Pilosella caespitosa
An aggressive hawkweed whose worldwide invasion translates into the batch's hardest-hitting attacker.
Meadow hawkweed (yellow fox-and-cubs) is native to East Asia and Europe and a notorious invasive across eastern North America, western North America, Oceania and South America. That aggressive spread shows up in the card: its invasive attack is one of the highest in this batch, and its starter hits hard.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Crown Split, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Splits at the crown and strikes from both. It lands for 44 damage as a native buffer and 50 as an invasive attacker. The free once-per-battle ability, Alkaloid Reservoir, comes online at level 25: Empties a season of alkaloids into the foe — saturating Poison. The advanced attack, Winterkill, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 27 native / 30 invasive — Kills it back to the ground — it withers and can't heal.
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, 12 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 45 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 45 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 35 against its native 25 — 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 45 / 71, and retreat stiffens to 24 Sun as it roots down. DEF barely leaves its soft band even so (1) — 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 -36 °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 -6.2 °C to a warm edge of 23.1 °C, a Cool-temperate 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.
This is the best pure attacker of the batch. Invasive, its introduced-range edge drives the attack to 35 against a native 25, and its starter is punishing — a real racer, if you can absorb the Faustian bench self-damage. Native, Basal Rosette and (late) Bind-immunity make it a sturdier-than-average buffer. It is still soft-bodied, so lead with the attack and keep a durable bench behind it. 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.