Passiflora tripartita
An invasive passionflower vine that opens with priority, suppresses the foe, and pays coins as a fruit.
Banana poka is a passionflower vine native to South America and an aggressive invasive across Africa, eastern North America, western North America, Oceania and South & Southeast Asia. It is a soft Competitor that combines suppression with the initiative rider on its starter — an unusual and useful package for a vine. It is also an edible fruit.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Tug, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Hauls itself in first: first in the wild, acts again on a kill. It lands for 27 damage as a native buffer and 30 as an invasive attacker. The free once-per-battle ability, Competitive Exclusion, comes online at level 25: Leaves no room at all — the foe stalls and withers. The advanced attack, Stranglehold, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 33 native / 35 invasive — Binds the foe in place, then squeezes.
Tug carries the initiative rider. In a wild encounter that means hard priority: it seizes the opening and strikes first regardless of speed, and if both sides bring a rider they cancel. In the arena the rider works differently — it grants no first strike; instead, when this move lands a lethal blow that actually drops the body, the attacker keeps the turn and acts again, and a chain like that can sweep a chipped bench. See moves.
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.
As a vine it is Moss Pole-eligible — the trellis gear that fits climbers. Its DEF is otherwise low, so a Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the main way to firm it up. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 8 DEF, 16 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 32 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 34 SPD (every turn after). As a native it takes a +15% health cushion (103 vs the base) and, while benched, projects a green overshield bar onto your active; as an invasive it swaps that for reach — attack climbs to 27 against its native 19 — at the cost of Faustian self-damage to its own bench on every damaging attack, and it concedes 2 prizes when knocked out. 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 34 / 52, and retreat stiffens to 33 Sun as it roots down. DEF barely leaves its soft band even so (15) — 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 6a — it should come through winters that bottom out near -21 °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 3.3 °C to a warm edge of 23.5 °C, a Subtropical 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.
Its opener, Tug, carries the initiative rider: in the wild it strikes first regardless of speed, and in the arena a lethal hit with it lets the vine act again. Allelopathy saps the enemy active's attack the whole fight, and Apical Dominance adds +5 ATK while it is unhurt. Play it invasive to press its higher attack (the introduced-range edge is large here), or native as a control buffer. As an edible, feeding it its matching fruit fertilizer (Phosphorus) pays ×1.25 coins. Soft-bodied, so keep a durable bench behind it.
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.