Carnegiea gigantea
A giant native succulent: enormous HP but almost no armor, healing every checkup through CAM and carrying an extra self HP reserve.
Saguaro is a succulent, and it plays as a Succulent card. It is native to Western North America and invasive nowhere, so in the arena it only ever fights as a native buffer, never an attacker.
None of its moves carries an initiative rider, so it never seizes first strike or an extra turn — its turn order is set by its tempo (see Stats).
Read off the card's actual trait schedule, it keeps these always-on traits, arriving at the levels shown:
It carries no certain trait keywords beyond the schedule above. It is not Moss Pole-eligible (it is not a climber). A Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the most useful slot for its soft body; a Cloche shields an attacker from contact poison.
Read at level 40, where every move is unlocked: HP 140, ATK 18, DEF 1, retreat 14 Sun. Its tempo splits the usual way — initiative 44 orders turn 1 and SPD 44 orders turn 2 onward — and it holds a fairly steady tempo across the fight.
Being native-only, it always fights as the buffer: the +15% HP cushion is baked into that HP, and while benched it projects a green HP overshield bar onto your active. It never takes the invasive attacker role, so it pays no Faustian self-damage and concedes no attacker prizes.
Maturity swells its biomass to a huge HP 276, but its succulent DEF band is near-zero, so DEF only reaches 1 — it ends a giant sponge, not a wall. Retreat rises to 27 Sun and its tempo bottoms out; all mass, no armor.
Saguaro is in the Specialist group on the succession wheel. It deals x1.5 to Competitors (perennial herbs, vines, shrubs, broadleaf trees) and takes x1.5 from the Ruderal group (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs), whose defense resists it to x0.667.
A giant native succulent: enormous HP but almost no armor, healing every checkup through CAM and carrying an extra self HP reserve. A huge sponge that soaks hits but strikes softly. It is edible (fruit), so feeding it Phosphorus pays x1.25 coins; any other nutrient banks x1.25 XP instead. The Total power gallery below marks its crossover — where its rising bulk overtakes its falling speed — at level 25; it only grows stronger with level, so never hold it back.
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.