Regent is very hard to play

I managed to first try Ascension 0 with almost every character, with the Regent I'm on my 6th run and I can barely get out of Act 1.

The main problem is, he is so fucking weak, I can't count the amount of turn where I look at the enemy damage and I'm like "Well, that's -17HP right there and I can't do nothing about it"

At the same time if you only lean into blocks then you don't get enough damage to manage elites and some of his best engines (it seems) are forge cards.

I don't know, I just cannot get the hang of that character, very complex to play.