"Remove Blank Lines" in Data Merge is Overriding Paragraph Styles

[InDesign 18.1, Mac)S 11.7.4]

How to "Remove Blank Lines" without affecting paragraph styles?

I'm designing cards for a board game. The client requested that each card ability have a distinct background and border, so I've made different Paragraph Styles for each. Each ability is its own column in the spreadsheet. No cards have all ability types, but most cards have a mix of 2 or 3. You can see them linked here with the Paragraph Style applied to each one.

When I preview this normally, here's how one of the cards looks. I'd like to automatically remove those blank variables from the deck when I create a merged document.

If I use activate "Remove Blank Lines..." in Content Placement Options, I get paragraph style overrides. In the example below, the previous page had a blank variable for the second paragraph, so it was deleted. However, that means the second paragraph on this page has the first Paragraph Style. 

Over the course of an entire deck, eventually all paragraphs in this text field get the first Paragraph Style instead of keeping their own.

I saw some bug reports that this has been fixed in InDesign v17.1, so I'm not sure why it's still occurring in 18.1.

tl;dr: Any advise for how to delete these blank lines without overriding the paragraph styles? I'd really prefer to do this at the data merge level rather than a post-merge script or search-replace.