Aster maackii
A native-only East Asian aster that buffers the bench and resists being pinned.
Maack's aster is an East Asian aster native to East Asia and invasive nowhere on record — a native-only soft Competitor. It is a support and collection card with a solid starter but a thin body.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Herbal Draught, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Brews its own remedy — strike and heal 12%. It lands for 28 damage. The free once-per-battle ability, Allelochemical Priming, comes online at level 25: Primes root chemistry — Poison the foe. The advanced attack, Winterkill, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 25 — Kills it back to the ground — it withers and can't heal.
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. Its armour is thin enough that a Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the one gear pick that meaningfully changes how it trades; see field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 1 DEF, 12 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 30 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 46 SPD (every turn after). It holds no invasive range in any tracked region, so it is a native-only card: it plays as a buffer, taking a +15% health cushion and, while benched, projecting a green overshield bar onto your active. There is no attacker scenario to build for it. 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 36 / 36, and retreat stiffens to 23 Sun as it roots down. DEF barely leaves its soft band even so (2) — this is a light-bodied card that swells in health without ever becoming armoured — and the inverted tempo has sunk to roughly 1% of cap. It is still strictly stronger at higher levels; the tempo it loses along the way is only a small turn-order lever.
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.
Bench it as a native buffer. Bitter Principle taxes attackers, and Deep Taproot makes it Bind-immune late. Its damage is modest, so it earns coins in single-player battles rather than carrying them. Inedible, so fertilizer banks XP. A fine family-tree piece and defensive filler, not a card to build around.
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.