Strength is a better arcana than Eternity even if you’re not good

I’ve been playing with the arcana and I feel like once you’ve got a couple of weapon aspects leveled up, strength [-50% damage taken/+25% damage dealt] is substantially stronger than the eternity [+3 death defiance], even if you’re not good at the game. Why?

  1. -50% damage taken is basically like 2 death defiances anyway since your effective HP pool is about the same. But it’s all the other side benefits that really make it so much better.

  2. If you take the arcana that restores life between rooms, you can almost always heal back to full health because you’ve taken less damage. Which is helped even more by point #3.

  3. You kill stuff faster so you’re taking less damage by virtue of stuff being dead and unable to damage you

  4. You can always take Athena’s deflect boon in the second or third zone because you can grab her keepsake. The deflect boon feels really OP against all ranged attacks.

I’m not a great player by any stretch and was just messing around with the arcana cards and on a whim tried the strength card and higher heat runs have gotten way easier because of all the points I’ve stated above.