Asimina triloba
A native perennial herb that opens with poison and can shrug off one lethal hit - a defender, never an attacker.
Common pawpaw is a soft Perennial herb that fights as a poisoning skirmisher with one built-in second chance. It is native to Eastern North America and has no invasive form, so it always plays the native side - a buffer for your bench, never an invasive attacker. It has solid ATK for a herb but almost no armor, so it trades on chip damage and luck. See nativity.
Its starter attack, Bitter Sap, unlocks at level 1 and costs 2 Sun, dealing about 30 damage and leaving poison on the target. The free once-per-battle ability, Perennating Bud, arrives at level 25: Breaks a stored bud: heal 40%. The advanced attack, Bitter End, unlocks at level 40 for 6 Sun (30 damage) as a plain, harder strike. Most of your pawpaws sit below level 40, where only the starter is available. No move carries an initiative rider, so it never seizes a turn. See Moves and statuses for how poison ticks.
Pawpaw keeps one always-on trait: Resprout. It draws only one eligible trait, so Resprout comes in at half strength on the level 10 riser and matures on the level 68 one. When it works it lets the plant survive one otherwise-lethal hit at roughly a quarter health - but it triggers only about 60% of the time, so treat it as a coin-flip reprieve, not a guarantee. See Abilities.
It carries no trait keywords. Its own attacks apply poison, but the plant itself is non-toxic to the touch - there is no contact recoil and no hazard ring, so nothing punishes an attacker merely for hitting it. Its growth habit is terrestrial, so it is not eligible for a Moss Pole. Since it only plays the native side, defensive field gear that shores up its thin armor suits it best.
At level 40 it reads 103 HP and 25 ATK; there is no invasive card, so it always plays the native side. DEF is just 2, at the soft floor of the perennial-herb band, so it takes hits with almost no armor. Its tempo is front-loaded: turn 1 runs on its initiative (35) and every turn after on its SPD (20), so it leads off the mark but is out-paced in a long fight. Retreat costs 14 Sun. As a native it gains a +15% HP cushion and, while benched, projects an HP overshield onto your active. See Stats.
Matured to level 100, pawpaw swells to 190 HP and 45 ATK, but its DEF only reaches 4 - a soft herb gains health, never armor, so it stays vulnerable to any real hitter. Retreat rises to 27 Sun, and its tempo has sunk to roughly 1% of cap, so a mature pawpaw acts last against almost anything young. Leveling buys HP and a matured Resprout, not a wall.
As a perennial herb, common pawpaw is in the Competitor succession group. It hits Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) for x1.5 and takes only x0.667 from them; it is weak to Specialist plants (succulents, conifers, ferns, epiphytes), which hit it for x1.5 while resisting its blows. Against other Competitors and the off-wheel Weird group the matchup is neutral. See Weaknesses & Resistances.
Play it as an aggressive native chipper: open with poison, let it tick, and count on Resprout to buy one extra turn. Its damage is respectable for a herb, but its fragility means it works best striking and retreating behind a tougher plant rather than standing in. It is inedible, so any nutrient you feed it banks x1.25 XP toward faster leveling rather than coins. In player-versus-player (PvP) matches it opens fast until about level 16, after which its added HP does more of the work - always stronger the higher you take it.
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.