Echinacea angustifolia
A native-only perennial herb that plays as a steady, poison-leaning skirmisher with soft armor.
Purple coneflower is a perennial-herb: a mid-weight card with a comfortable HP pool and very little armor. It is native to eastern and western North America and has no introduced range at all, so it only ever fields the native buffer role. There is no attacker version of this card to plan around.
The starter attack, Stolon Reach, is available from Lv 1. It costs 2 Sun and deals 31 damage: Runs a stolon out fast — and keeps the speed.
The free once-per-battle ability, Alkaloid Reservoir, unlocks at Lv 25. It deals no damage — Empties a season of alkaloids into the foe — saturating Poison. That saturates the target with Poison, which ignores armor and bleeds through the overshield, so it is the card's main way to threaten a heavy defender.
The advanced attack, Taproot Canal, unlocks at Lv 40, costs 6 Sun and deals 26 damage: Drives down and draws the foe dry. None of these moves carries an initiative rider, so it never seizes an extra turn on a kill.
Read off its trait schedule, this card keeps two always-on traits: Bitter Principle arrives on the first riser at Lv 10, and Contractile Roots stacks on at Lv 68. Bitter Principle is a contact retaliation: whenever an attacker lands a damaging hit on this card, its bitter sesquiterpene lactones Wither the attacker with a stacking -ATK debuff worth two stacks per hit, so anything that keeps striking it steadily loses attack power. Contractile Roots is a slow-building wall: each checkup the fight drags on, the roots pull the crown deeper for +1 DEF, up to +5 DEF total over a long fight. Neither is one of the chance-based sustain heals, so they are simply on once reached rather than triggering on the 60% roll. Its toxicity is none and it holds no Toxin trait, so striking it in melee does not poison the attacker.
This is an unarmed, non-toxic perennial herb, so it carries no thorns or contact-poison recoil for an attacker to fear. For field gear, a Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the most useful pick — it adds flat DEF on top of this card's thin category armor, which matters more here than on a naturally hard target. It is not a climber, so it takes no Moss Pole.
At the snapshot level of 40, native HP reads 103 (the native role adds a 15% HP cushion) and DEF is just 1, low even for a perennial herb. Its opening tempo, 35, is lower than its sustained tempo, 45, so it is a slightly slow starter that speeds up from turn two onward. Retreat costs 12 Sun. Benched behind another card it projects only a thin overshield sliver, because it is a Least-Concern species. See stats for how each value is built.
Maturing swells its HP to 190, but DEF barely leaves its soft band at 1 — this is a biomass card, not a wall, and it stays vulnerable to any real attacker. Retreat climbs to 22 Sun as it roots down, and its inverted tempo sinks toward its floor, so the modest turn-order edge it has at Lv 40 is nearly gone by the endgame.
As a perennial herb it is in the Competitor succession group. It hits Ruderal cards (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) for ×1.5 and is resisted by Specialists (succulents, conifers, ferns, epiphytes), which hit it for ×1.5 in return. See weaknesses & resistances.
Play it as a native buffer: a body with enough HP to soak a few hits while its poison ability wears down a tank the raw damage can't. It is serviceable but unexceptional — the thin DEF means it folds to a dedicated attacker, so keep it backed on the bench. It is not edible, so any fertilizer you feed it banks ×1.25 XP rather than coins. It fights as a fast skirmisher until about Lv 29, after which its growing bulk outweighs its fading turn-order edge.
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.