Armor is still effective. It just takes a decent chunk of gold to make it pay off. Consider either the brute with defensive tactics or the sun with defensive stance along with the following:

tower shield +2

heater shield

platemail

moon earring

this doesn’t even account for specific card shields each round you could lay down. But you’ve got a natural shield 1 from the persistent loss and then the possibility of 8-shields after that that are refreshable (either via long resting or the moon earring) which means you can do this 3/4/5 cycles of shields per game depending on rest cycles. It costs an absolute poo ton to get but you can just hang out and eat attacks all day without caring about a thing. Meanwhile you’re glass canon teammates can wreak havoc