This was a lot of fun! It took me a handful of tries to win it, but experimenting and figuring out a viable build was pretty satisfying.
Having to power up your ship at the start of combat was nice because it meant that there was always a risk of unlucky early card draw killing you even if your overpowered deck was steamrollering most enemies. That said, the only strategy I found for mitigating that was stacking my deck with a ton of engines since besides having a basic or fusion reactor, none of the topdeck cards seemed consistently useful enough to justify having them. Once you're drawing back up to a full hand every turn, you can use all those evade cards you also have to survive pretty much anything and take your time sifting through your massive deck looking for the cards you need to actually do damage.
I also appreciate that the enemy was playing by the same rules since it led to high variability in what the enemy was able to do, sometimes failing to play anything useful and getting crushed and other times getting an advanced weapons system out early and causing problems. It also led to an amusing accidental cheese where I let my opponent clog up their hand with 4 evade cards so they were only able to play 1 card per turn.
Another observation, early on it's advantageous to fight all the enemies to build out your deck, but once you reach the later sectors it seems better to avoid as many enemies as possible since they don't drop better cards and there's a very real risk of dying to unlucky card draw.
I feel like the game would benefit from more enemy types (maybe including some mini-bosses and/or a final boss) and a bigger variety of cards, but it's a nice amount of content for a 7DRL.