Anisodontea capensis
A mid-band mallow shrub that buffers the bench as a native and hits a little harder as an invasive.
Cape Mallow is a shrub — a mid-band bruiser native to Africa that turns up as an invasive in Europe and Oceania. Native, it plays as a durable buffer for the bench; invasive, it leans on a firmer attack. Either way it is a solid, unspectacular middleweight rather than a star.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Tick Tumble, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Shakes the tick load loose onto the foe. It lands for 26 damage as a native buffer and 27 as an invasive attacker. The free once-per-battle ability, Arrested Succession, comes online at level 25: Stops the forest before it starts — the foe stalls and can't heal. The advanced attack, Thorn in the Side, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 29 native / 30 invasive — A thorn that festers — Poison the foe.
This card keeps two always-on traits, drawn from its category pool and read straight off its schedule (the rest of the pool is dropped for good). The first is live for most of the card's life; the second stacks on late.
It is not a climber, so no Moss Pole. A Calcium/Magnesium amendment adds flat DEF on top of its shrub cover; a Cloche wards it from chemical recoil when it dives onto a defended plant. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 11 DEF, 12 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 50 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 50 SPD (every turn after). As a native it takes a +15% health cushion (103 vs the base) and, while benched, projects a green overshield bar onto your active; as an invasive it swaps that for reach — attack climbs to 19 against its native 15 — at the cost of Faustian self-damage to its own bench on every damaging attack, and it concedes 2 prizes when knocked out. Damage is diminishing armour — a hit scales by its attack over attack-plus-DEF, so a big attacker punches through cover a small one cannot, and poison ignores DEF entirely. See stats and the overshield.
By level 100 the floor-to-cap law has carried it well past that snapshot: health rises to 190 (native) / 165 (invasive), attack to 25 / 36, and retreat stiffens to 23 Sun as it roots down. DEF firms to 21, a mid-band shrub's worth of cover, and the inverted tempo has sunk to about 1% of cap. It keeps getting stronger as it levels; the speed it sheds is only a minor turn-order edge.
Roughly USDA zone 5a — it should come through winters that bottom out near -28 °C. Colder than that and it wants shelter, a wall, or a winter indoors. In its own terms it runs from a cold edge of -1.3 °C to a warm edge of 23.7 °C, a Temperate · wide-ranging band. Somewhere near the cold edge it will want a sheltered spot or a wall; below it, protection or a winter indoors. Treat the zone as a rough guide, not a promise: it comes from a regression whose error runs a little over one full zone, which is why the card hedges it as roughly.
The card's climate chip is the player-facing form of all that — it reads your current location, not the plant's homeland, so it changes as you travel.
| Chip | What it means | Battle XP |
|---|---|---|
| Thrives here | your local winter low and summer heat both sit inside its range | x2 |
| In range | it survives where you are but sits near one of its edges | x1.25 |
| Colder than its range | your winters drop below what it tolerates; outdoors it needs protection | no bonus |
| Hotter than its range | your summers run past its warm edge | no bonus |
The chip's only effect is on battle XP: a card that thrives or sits in range banks a multiplier when it fights, and nothing else — damage, stats, growth speed, catch rate and the coin economy are all untouched by climate. A reading of colder than its range is usually just a fact about the winter outside your window, not a verdict on the plant.
On the succession wheel this is a Competitor. It strikes Ruderal cards — annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs — for ×1.5 damage, and takes ×1.5 in return from Specialist cards — succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes. Every other matchup is neutral.
Play it native as a bench buffer that holds a green overshield out for your active, or invasive as a straightforward attacker with a small ATK bump. It is a competent all-rounder with no glaring weakness and no headline strength — a reliable middle-of-the-collection card and a steady coin earner in single-player battles, but one that wants backup on the bench against anything specialised. It is inedible, so any fertilizer you feed it banks the ×1.25 XP bonus rather than coins.
Leveling trades speed for power. A plant’s tempo (SPD + INI, the turn-order edge) fades as it grows, while its power (HP + ATK + DEF, net of the rising Sun cost to retreat) climbs. The crossover is the level where power overtakes tempo: below it the plant is a fast skirmisher, above it a heavyweight. Shown for each stance this plant can actually hold — native adds a HP cushion, invasive an attack edge, neutral neither — with the card at its crossover and fully grown at Lv 100.