Cycas siamensis
A native-only Conifer card that is tough and very slow, built to strengthen a native bench rather than fight.
Cycad is a Conifer card, native to South Asia and listed as invasive nowhere, which makes it native-only. It always plays the buffer role: a +15% health cushion and a bench overshield projected onto your active plant. There is no attacker version. See nativity and categories.
The starter attack, Needle Rake, unlocks at level 1 for 2 Sun and hits for 33. Rakes with stiff needles. It is the card's hardest hit.
The free once-per-battle ability, Old-Growth Stand, unlocks at level 25 and costs no Sun. Ancient and immovable: heal 70%, and the foe is pinned.
The advanced attack, Serotiny Surprise, unlocks at level 40 for 6 Sun and lands for 27. Cones that only fire opens, all at once, across the bench. It hits for less than the starter at three times the Sun cost, so the starter remains this card's damage. See moves.
Xylem Tracheids arrives on the first riser at level 10 at full strength — flat damage reduction on incoming direct attacks. On top of already-solid armour, it makes the card genuinely hard to grind down.
Network stacks on at level 68 and amplifies the buffs your native bench is projecting. It is a support trait that rewards building a deliberately native bench rather than a mixed one.
The species record lists no toxicity here and no trait keywords, so no poison rider applies to this card in play. For field gear, the gap is tempo. Its growth habit is not vine, epiphyte or hemiepiphyte, so a Moss Pole does not apply. Its conservation status is vulnerable.
At level 40 the native side reads 103 HP and 19 ATK. Armour is 19, which is good. Retreat is 16 Sun. Opening tempo is 13, at the bottom of the range, while sustained tempo is 34 — so it concedes the first turn almost always and then keeps pace. See stats.
By level 100 health reaches 190 and attack 33, with armour at 42. A durable card rather than a threatening one — the defensive stack arrives, the attack stat never really does. Retreat rises to 33 Sun and the inverted tempo has fallen to its floor.
Conifer is Specialist. Specialist outlasts Competitor, so this card hits perennial herbs, vines, shrubs and broadleaf trees harder. It loses to Ruderal — annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs. See weaknesses and resistances.
A support blocker. It is tough, it has a useful type advantage into the Competitor group, and its level 68 trait makes the rest of a native bench better. What it does not have is damage or speed — both attacks are modest and it acts near-last in every matchup.
Build around it rather than with it: on a native-heavy bench Network is a real contribution, and on a mixed bench it does very little.
It is not eaten, so a soil amendment earns no matching fertiliser coins and instead banks the ×1.25 XP an inedible plant pays. See 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.