Lycopus rubellus
A native-only water horehound that buffers the bench and, once mature, can survive a killing blow.
Taperleaf water horehound is a wetland mint native to eastern North America and western North America and invasive nowhere on record — a native-only soft Competitor with a genuinely useful survival trait late.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Bitter Sap, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Bitter compounds poison the foe. It lands for 30 damage. The free once-per-battle ability, Seral Persistence, comes online at level 25: Refuses to be replaced: heal 60%, and the foe can't heal. The advanced attack, Rhizome Lock, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 22 — Locks the foe down underground and saps it.
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. Its armour is thin enough that a Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the one gear pick that meaningfully changes how it trades; see field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 1 DEF, 11 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 37 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 37 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 190 (native) / 165 (invasive), attack to 45 / 45, and retreat stiffens to 21 Sun as it roots down. DEF barely leaves its soft band even so (2) — this is a light-bodied card that swells in health without ever becoming armoured — and the inverted tempo has sunk to roughly 1% of cap. It is still strictly stronger at higher levels; the tempo it loses along the way is only a small turn-order lever.
Roughly USDA zone 3b — it should come through winters that bottom out near -35 °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 -5.3 °C to a warm edge of 27.4 °C, a Cool-temperate · wide-ranging 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.
Play it as a native buffer that is hard to finish off: from level 68 Resprout gives it a 60% chance to survive an otherwise-lethal hit at 25% health — a coin-flip-plus save that can steal a fight. Basal Rosette firms its early cover. Its damage is low, so it is a survivor and coin earner rather than an attacker. Inedible, so fertilizer banks XP.
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.