The Water breaks Golden Needle

[.mana]

The challenge Golden Needle should be revised. Yeah, yeah, its supposed to be challenging and RNG is part of the game, etc.
Even so, if you get a boss like The Water (0 discards) in the early Antes, its pretty much a guaranteed loss.
Looking from the "fun" perspective, the only real mechanic/resource of the challenge is having extra discards (and it already costs money to use them). The moment you remove this from the equation, its no longer fun and relies too much on RNG, rather than good decision making. For example, you would need insane luck of getting Telescope/Director's cut and/or planet cards for High card/Pair early.
Aditionally, The Mouth/The Needle/The eye bosses are completely irrelevant here.
I think this could be easily fixed by adding a boss exception for the challenge.

[Ronald Brain]

Just like you said, there are numerous boss blind that's irrelevant in this challenge, which I think might be the reason Thunk decided to not ban The Water. It's frustrating to encounter it when your build was just about to take off, and you spent the next 2 shop to reroll for Luchador to no avail.

[Goblin]

I think a nice alternative to banning it outright, would be to make the high discard count in the challenge be because of "bonus discards" the same way Burglar gives "bonus hands" that get added after the boss effect. So just like how Burglar makes the The Needle boss easy by giving extra hands, you'd still have 2 or 3 discards on The Water in Golden Needle. Would still be a challenging boss, but not an outright death sentence as long as you're playing well.