Cephalanthera austiniae
Phantom orchid is a frail, native-only epiphyte card from western North America — a light bench buffer with a steady self-heal and a first-strike opener, not a fighter.
Phantom orchid is an Epiphyte-category card. It is native to western North America and is recorded as invasive nowhere, so it has only one battle role: a native buffer that leans on turn order and a trickle of self-healing rather than raw damage — see how the arena region sets your role on the nativity guide. It is a light, fragile card, better as a bench-support option and a family-tree collection piece than a front-line fighter.
Its kit fills in across three levels (moves):
Most of your copies will sit well below level 40, so expect to fight with just the starter for a long stretch before the ability and advanced attack come online.
This card keeps two always-on traits (abilities), drawn one per riser:
Neither of these is a coin-flip sustain — they land every checkup they are allowed to, unlike the roster's 60%-chance heals. Together they make the phantom orchid quietly durable for its size, though the amounts are small.
It carries no toxicity and no thorns, so it neither poisons a striker nor recoils onto one (statuses). It does not qualify for a Moss Pole: as an off-catalog scan sorted into the epiphyte pool by family alone, its growth habit is not curated as a climber, so the game treats it as a non-climber and the pole does nothing for it. Being native-only, it prefers defensive field gear — a Ca/Mg amendment to shore up its very low DEF, or a Cloche to blunt incoming poison.
At level 40 it reads 103 HP and 19 ATK with only 2 DEF — glassy, typical of the soft epiphyte band. Its tempo is high: opening initiative 28 and sustained SPD 34, so it tends to move first early in a fight (stats). Retreat costs 16 Sun. As a native it adds a +15% HP cushion and, while benched, projects a small overshield bar onto your active — a sliver here, because it is a Least-Concern species. It has no invasive form, so there is no attacker profile to weigh.
Fully grown it reaches 190 HP and 33 ATK, but its DEF only inches up to 3 — a soft card that gains biomass without ever gaining armor. Retreat climbs to 33 Sun as it becomes more rooted, and its once-brisk tempo sinks to roughly its 1% floor, so the mature card no longer wins turn order the way its level-40 pips suggest. Maturing makes it bigger and slower, but it stays a fragile support piece rather than hardening into anything.
As an epiphyte it belongs to the Specialist succession group (weaknesses & resistances): it hits Competitor plants (perennial herbs, vines, shrubs, broadleaf trees) for x1.5 and is resisted by Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) at x0.667. Specialists are neutral against other Specialists and against the off-wheel Weird category. See the categories overview.
Play the phantom orchid as a native bench support: its overshield contribution is slim but free, and its two self-heal traits let it soak a little more than its HP bar suggests. In the field it can open with Tug's first-strike to grab tempo against a faster foe, but its damage is low and its armor is negligible, so it is not a card to carry a run on its own. It is inedible, so feeding it any fertilizer banks x1.25 XP rather than coins — treat it as a growth sink and a collection card. It fights as a fast skirmisher only until about level 22, after which its rising bulk edges ahead of its fading speed, though for a card this frail that later "power" phase is relative. Test lines with it in the Battle Lab.
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.