Cercis canadensis
A legume shrub whose nectar chips attackers and which resists fire, healing when Burned.
Eastern Redbud is a shrub, and it plays as a Shrub card. It is native to Eastern 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 121, ATK 25, DEF 12, retreat 15 Sun. Its tempo splits the usual way — initiative 35 orders turn 1 and SPD 20 orders turn 2 onward — and it opens quicker than it cruises — a fast starter that gets out-paced as the fight drags on.
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 firms it into the shrub band — DEF reaches 24, well above any weed — while HP grows to 233. Retreat rises to 31 Sun and its tempo sinks to its floor; a sturdy mid-weight, not a glass cannon.
Eastern Redbud is in the Competitor group on the succession wheel. It deals x1.5 to the Ruderal group (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) and takes x1.5 from Specialists (succulents, conifers, ferns, epiphytes), against which its own damage is resisted to x0.667.
A legume shrub whose nectar chips attackers and which resists fire, healing when Burned. A firm, self-supporting mid-weight. It is edible (fruit), so feeding it Phosphorus pays x1.25 coins; any other nutrient banks x1.25 XP instead. As a legume, one in four caught in the wild arrives with the Nitrogen amendment already equipped — a free head start worth roughly 300 coins — but the nodules decompose after about a month, so it is an economy freebie, not lasting combat power. The Total power gallery below marks its crossover — where its rising bulk overtakes its falling speed — at level 12; 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.