Juniperus thurifera
Incense juniper (*Juniperus thurifera*) is a native-only conifer that plays as a defensive buffer.
Incense juniper (Juniperus thurifera) is a conifer, an armored, Sun-feeding body in battle terms. It is native to Africa and Europe and invasive nowhere on the map, so it only ever fields its native, defensive form — there is no attacker version of this card. Read across the fight it is slow to open but faster once the fight settles into a rhythm.
The kit fills in as the card levels — most of your copies will be well below the snapshot level of 40 used for the numbers here.
This card keeps two always-on traits, drawn from its category's pool and locked in once and for all — everything else the pool offered was dropped.
It carries no special keyword traits — no innate toxin, thorns, carnivory or succulence — so it plays as a straight conifer. Its growth habit is not recorded as a climbing one, so it does not take a Moss Pole. For field gear, a native copy leaning into the defender role wants a Calcium/Magnesium soil amendment to push its DEF even higher into wall territory; an attacker copy would rather spend the slot on the fertilizer that suits its role, and a Cloche is worth holding if you expect a poison-heavy opponent. See nativity for how region sets its role and abilities for the trait model.
Read at the snapshot level of 40, where every move is unlocked: 140 HP (native, including the roughly 15% cushion), 22 DEF, tempo of 16 opening / 33 sustained, and a 20 Sun retreat cost. Its Sun bar caps at 120 and refills in real time; from Level 52 it also regenerates Sun mid-battle, and a Level 85 capstone makes the starter free. Its DEF (22 at the snapshot level) is category-sourced from being a tree scaled by wood density, so it is genuinely armored where soft plants are not. As a native defender it gains a roughly 15% HP cushion (140 HP at the snapshot level) and, while benched, projects a green overshield bar onto whatever card is active for you. See stats for the full model.
Grown to the cap, the floor-to-cap stat law turns this card into a wall: HP climbs to 276 and DEF hardens to 49 off its wood density, well beyond its Level-40 reading, while the retreat cost rises to 44 Sun as an old tree grows harder to move. The inverted tempo, high when it was a seedling, has sunk to about 1% of cap by now — a mature tree is slow but very hard to bring down. Leveling buys real bulk and armor at the cost of ever going first.
By category it belongs to the Specialist succession group. On the type wheel, Specialist deals extra damage to Competitor plants (perennial herbs, vines, shrubs and broadleaf trees) and takes extra from Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatic plants and bulbs); a strong matchup lands at ×1.5 and a resisted one at ×0.667. Everything off those two edges — including the Weird categories — is neutral. See weaknesses and resistances.
With no invasive form, it is purely a defender: park it as a native on the bench to feed the overshield, or lead with it as a durable wall. As a tree it is a strong single-player pick — durable, good for grinding coins, and a solid family-tree collection piece. It is inedible, so any fertilizer you feed it banks ×1.25 XP — a steady way to level a collection piece. Leveling steadily trades falling turn-order speed for rising bulk and attack: it fights as a fast skirmisher up to about Level 7, after which its power takes over — it is monotonically stronger the higher you level it, so there is never a reason to hold it back. The Total power panel below charts this trade-off for each stance it can hold.
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.