Eubotrys racemosa
A native-only wetland shrub that buffers the bench and punishes attackers with ant-guard chip.
Swamp sweetbells is a wetland shrub native to eastern North America and invasive nowhere on record, so it is a native-only card that plays purely as a bench buffer. It starts with a slightly larger health floor than most shrubs, which makes it a touch sturdier young.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Snarl, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Snarls the foe up in thorny growth — it can't pull loose. It lands for 29 damage. The free once-per-battle ability, Thicket Formation, comes online at level 25: Closes into thicket — Bind, and the foe can't heal. The advanced attack, Blackthorn Barrage, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 42 — Every thorn it has, all at once.
This card keeps two always-on traits, drawn from its category pool and read straight off its schedule (the rest of the pool is dropped for good). The first is live for most of the card's life; the second stacks on late.
It is not a climber, so no Moss Pole. A Calcium/Magnesium amendment adds flat DEF on top of its shrub cover; a Cloche wards it from chemical recoil when it dives onto a defended plant. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 121 HP with 10 DEF, 13 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 22 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 32 SPD (every turn after). It holds no invasive range in any tracked region, so it is a native-only card: it plays as a buffer, taking a +15% health cushion and, while benched, projecting a green overshield bar onto your active. There is no attacker scenario to build for it. Damage is diminishing armour — a hit scales by its attack over attack-plus-DEF, so a big attacker punches through cover a small one cannot, and poison ignores DEF entirely. See stats and the overshield.
By level 100 the floor-to-cap law has carried it well past that snapshot: health rises to 233 (native) / 203 (invasive), attack to 41 / 41, and retreat stiffens to 26 Sun as it roots down. DEF firms to 20, a mid-band shrub's worth of cover, and the inverted tempo has sunk to about 1% of cap. It keeps getting stronger as it levels; the speed it sheds is only a minor turn-order edge.
Roughly USDA zone 4b — it should come through winters that bottom out near -31 °C. Colder than that and it wants shelter, a wall, or a winter indoors. In its own terms it runs from a cold edge of -2.9 °C to a warm edge of 26.8 °C, a Temperate band. Somewhere near the cold edge it will want a sheltered spot or a wall; below it, protection or a winter indoors. Treat the zone as a rough guide, not a promise: it comes from a regression whose error runs a little over one full zone, which is why the card hedges it as roughly.
The card's climate chip is the player-facing form of all that — it reads your current location, not the plant's homeland, so it changes as you travel.
| Chip | What it means | Battle XP |
|---|---|---|
| Thrives here | your local winter low and summer heat both sit inside its range | x2 |
| In range | it survives where you are but sits near one of its edges | x1.25 |
| Colder than its range | your winters drop below what it tolerates; outdoors it needs protection | no bonus |
| Hotter than its range | your summers run past its warm edge | no bonus |
The chip's only effect is on battle XP: a card that thrives or sits in range banks a multiplier when it fights, and nothing else — damage, stats, growth speed, catch rate and the coin economy are all untouched by climate. A reading of colder than its range is usually just a fact about the winter outside your window, not a verdict on the plant.
On the succession wheel this is a Competitor. It strikes Ruderal cards — annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs — for ×1.5 damage, and takes ×1.5 in return from Specialist cards — succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes. Every other matchup is neutral.
Use it as a native buffer: bench it to project a green overshield onto your active, and let its ant-guard chip punish anything that trades blows with it. It is a serviceable defensive body but a low-attack one, so it earns coins in single-player battles rather than carrying them. Inedible, so fertilizer banks XP, not coins. A dependable collection and support card, not a front-line threat.
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.