Magnolia × soulangeana
Chinese Magnolia (*Magnolia × soulangeana*) is a broadleaf tree that buffers on the bench when native and turns aggressor when invasive.
Chinese Magnolia (Magnolia × soulangeana) is a broadleaf tree, a heavyweight, armored body in battle terms. It is native to East Asia, where it plays as a defensive buffer, and invasive in Eastern North America, where it turns aggressor. Read across the fight it is middling to open and a touch faster as the fight wears on.
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 broadleaf tree. 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), 23 DEF, tempo of 28 opening / 38 sustained, and a 19 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 (23 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. As an invasive attacker its ATK identity (18, against 15 for the native form) is built from how widely it spreads plus an introduced-range term, and it pays "Faustian" self-damage to its own bench on every damaging attack — a cost that grows as it levels — while conceding 2 prizes when it is knocked out. Note the two roles diverge only as the card matures: at Level 1 an invasive reads the same ATK as its native self, and the attacking edge is deferred onto the higher-level caps. 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 51 off its wood density, well beyond its Level-40 reading, while the retreat cost rises to 41 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 Competitor succession group. On the type wheel, Competitor deals extra damage to Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatic plants and bulbs) and takes extra from Specialist plants (succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes); 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.
Play the native copy as a bench buffer and health sponge, and the invasive copy as an attacker that races to trade before the Faustian bench cost adds up. 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 15, 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.