Orthosiphon aristatus
A soft, quick perennial herb that plays purely as a native buffer, leaning on a poison starter and a slow-building attack boost.
Cat's whiskers is a fast, lightly-built Perennial herb that plays as a support piece rather than a bruiser. In the current regions it is native to East Asia, Oceania, and South Asia and is invasive nowhere, so it is a native-only card: it fights entirely as a buffer, and there is no attacker side to it. Its value is in what it does for the bench and the Poison it can stick on a foe, not in its own bulk.
Its moves unlock across three levels. The starter Volatile Oils unlocks at level 1 and costs 2 Sun: Releases volatile oils — Poison the foe. It hits for 27, and the Poison it applies is damage over time that ignores DEF and slips past any overshield. The free once-per-battle ability Chronosequence unlocks at level 25 and costs no Sun: Time on its side: +3 ATK and speed, kept. Because that boost is kept, it compounds over a long fight. The advanced attack Herbaceous Assault unlocks at level 40 and costs 6 Sun: A season's growth thrown at once — the foe wilts. It deals 32. No move here carries the initiative rider, so it acts in the normal turn order.
It keeps two always-on traits, arriving at different levels. Basal rosette comes in at level 10: the ground-hugging leaf crown resists being worn down and adds a flat few points of DEF, which matters a lot on a card whose base armor is almost nothing. Vernalization memory stacks on at level 68, and it is a slow-burn effect: it adds a chunk of ATK, but only from the third turn onward, rewarding a card that survives the opening and settles into a longer fight. For most of its playable life the card has only the rosette DEF; the ATK payoff is a late unlock and a late-in-the-turn one.
It carries no special trait keywords. For field gear, the obvious pick is anything that shores up its paper-thin defense — a Calcium/Magnesium amendment adds flat DEF, and a Cloche wards the Poison it might take in return. It is a herb, not a climber, so it takes no Moss Pole. There is no invasive gear plan to describe, since it holds no invasive role.
At level 40, its HP is 103, which already folds in the +15% native cushion. Its ATK is 24. Its defining weakness is DEF: at 1 it is about as soft as a card gets, so it relies on Poison (which ignores armor anyway) and on its ability's kept boost rather than on trading blows head-on. On tempo, initiative 33 orders the first turn and SPD 36 orders the turns after; it is a hair slow off the mark but a faster cruiser, so it tends to win turn order once a fight is under way. Retreat costs 11 Sun, among the cheaper exits in the game. While benched it projects a green HP overshield bar onto your active, which is much of its job.
It grows into a bigger, still-fragile version of itself. HP swells to 190 and ATK to 43, but DEF barely moves — 2 is still deep in the soft-herb band, so it never becomes a wall no matter how far you level it. Retreat rises to 21 Sun as it roots in, and its early tempo edge has faded to almost nothing by the cap. The lesson is that leveling buys this card mass and a bigger Poison-per-turn body to hide behind, not toughness.
As a perennial herb it is in the Competitor succession group. It deals x1.5 to Ruderal plants (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs) and resists them down to x0.667, but it loses the exchange to Specialists (succulents, conifers, ferns, epiphytes), who hit it for x1.5. Matchups against other Competitors and the Weird categories are neutral.
This is a bench card, and an honest read is that it is not a strong solo battler — its DEF is minimal and its ATK modest. Play it for what it gives the team: a green overshield bar for your active, a cheap retreat, and a starter that lands Poison you can leave ticking while a tougher card does the trading. The kept ATK boost and the from-turn-three vernalization ATK both reward long fights, so it is at its best in drawn-out exchanges rather than quick trades. It is not edible, so any fertilizer banks x1.25 XP toward leveling rather than coins; it earns its slot as a support piece and a family-tree entry. As a native it leans on tempo early and on its accumulated ATK later, crossing over around level 24.
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.