Echinacea pallida
A native-only perennial herb that leans on poison-tipped attacks and a soft body, playing purely as a bench buffer with no attacker form.
Pale purple coneflower is a perennial-herb card native to eastern North America and introduced nowhere. Because it has no invasive range, it only ever plays as a native buffer: there is no attacker form of this plant, so the whole page reads through the native (or the neutral base) profile. Its category places it in the Competitor succession group (see categories).
All numbers below are read at the snapshot level 40, where every slot is unlocked. Most of your copies will be well below this.
The starter, Bitter Sap, unlocks at Lv 1 and costs 2 Sun for 29 damage: Bitter compounds poison the foe. The free once-per-battle ability, Allelochemical Priming, unlocks at Lv 25 and deals no damage: Primes root chemistry — Poison the foe. The advanced attack, Alkaloid Ambush, unlocks at Lv 40, costs 6 Sun and lands 24: Poisons before the foe can react. None of its moves carry the initiative rider, so it never seizes an extra turn. See moves.
This card keeps two always-on traits, drawn one per riser. At Lv 10 it gains basal-rosette, which adds a flat +3 DEF as the low rosette hugs the ground against grazing. At Lv 68 Resprout stacks on top. Resprout is one of the sustain traits, so it is not a guarantee: it lets the plant survive a single lethal hit at roughly a quarter of its HP, but it only triggers about 60% of the time. Below Lv 68 the card has only the +3 DEF from basal-rosette to lean on.
The plant holds no Thorns, Toxin or Unpalatable contact trait, so attackers take no recoil for striking it. It is a soft-bodied herb, so a Calcium/Magnesium soil amendment (flat DEF) does the most to firm it up; a Cloche and other field gear round it out. Its growth habit is not a climber, so it is not Moss Pole eligible.
At 40 it reads 103 HP and 23 ATK as a native, on a soft 1 DEF. Retreat costs 12 Sun. Its tempo is balanced: opening initiative 38 decides turn 1 and sustained SPD 38 decides turn 2 onward, and here the two are almost equal, so it is neither a notably quick starter nor a slow cruiser. As a native it carries a +15% HP cushion, and while benched it projects an HP overshield onto your active. Because it is invasive nowhere, it never pays the invasive bench self-damage and concedes no extra prizes. See stats.
Fully grown, HP swells toward 190 but DEF barely leaves its soft band at 1 — this is a big-HP, thin-armor herb, not a wall. Retreat rises to 23 Sun as the plant becomes more rooted, and the inverted tempo has sunk to roughly its 1% floor by the cap, so a mature coneflower is slow off the mark. Maturing buys it bulk and staying power, not defense.
As a perennial-herb it is in the Competitor group: it hits Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) for ×1.5, is resisted to ×0.667 by Specialists (succulents, conifers, ferns, epiphytes), and is neutral against other Competitors and the Weird group. See weaknesses & resistances.
Play it as a native bench buffer: park it behind a heavier active to stack an HP overshield, and let its poison-tipped attacks chip a tank down through armor. It is a serviceable, unremarkable card — soft DEF and modest ATK mean it wants backup rather than carrying a fight alone, and the Resprout save only arrives late and only lands about 60% of the time. It is not edible, so any fertilizer you feed it banks the ×1.25 XP boost rather than coins. On the total-power gallery it leans on tempo early and shifts toward its (still modest) bulk from about Lv 27 — that is which edge dominates, not a reason to hold it back from leveling.
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.