Physalis peruviana
Cape gooseberry (*Physalis peruviana*) is a perennial herb that buffers on the bench when native and turns aggressor when invasive.
Cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana) is a perennial herb, a resilient mid-weight body in battle terms. It is native to South America, where it plays as a defensive buffer, and invasive in Africa, East Asia, Europe, Eastern North America, Western North America, Oceania and South Asia, where it turns aggressor. Read across the fight it is a sharp starter that seizes the opening turn, then eases to a slower cruise.
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 perennial herb. 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 firm up its otherwise thin DEF; 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: 103 HP (native, including the roughly 15% cushion), 4 DEF, tempo of 49 opening / 34 sustained, and a 16 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 is soft (4 at the snapshot level), the low perennial herb band, so it leans on health and recovery rather than armor. As a native defender it gains a roughly 15% HP cushion (103 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 (33, against 17 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, its HP reaches 190 while DEF firms only modestly to 8 — the middling perennial herb band, tougher than a weed but no wall. The retreat cost rises to 33 Sun, and the inverted tempo has fallen to about 1% of cap from its higher early reading. Maturing buys bulk and a little more staying power, at the cost of the speed it had when young.
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. It is a serviceable mid-weight card — usable in single-player and worth collecting, without being a top-tier pick. It is edible with a resolved edible part (fruit), so feeding it the matching phosphorus fertilizer pays ×1.25 coins; any other nutrient banks ×1.25 XP instead. Leveling steadily trades falling turn-order speed for rising bulk and attack: it fights as a fast skirmisher up to about Level 32, 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.