Pinus ponderosa
A native conifer wall that heals every checkup and chips the foe with acidic needle litter — a durable, self-sustaining tank.
Ponderosa Pine is a conifer, and it plays as a Conifer card. It is native to Western North America and invasive nowhere, so in the arena it only ever fights as a native buffer, never an attacker.
None of its moves carries an initiative rider, so it never seizes first strike or an extra turn — its turn order is set by its tempo (see Stats).
Read off the card's actual trait schedule, it keeps these always-on traits, arriving at the levels shown:
It carries no certain trait keywords beyond the schedule above. It is not Moss Pole-eligible (it is not a climber). A Calcium/Magnesium amendment stacks even more DEF onto its wall; a Cloche protects an attacker from contact poison.
Read at level 40, where every move is unlocked: HP 140, ATK 20, DEF 17, retreat 18 Sun. Its tempo splits the usual way — initiative 37 orders turn 1 and SPD 22 orders turn 2 onward — and it opens quicker than it cruises — a fast starter that gets out-paced as the fight drags on.
Being native-only, it always fights as the buffer: the +15% HP cushion is baked into that HP, and while benched it projects a green HP overshield bar onto your active. It never takes the invasive attacker role, so it pays no Faustian self-damage and concedes no attacker prizes.
Maturity hardens it into a wall: DEF climbs to 38 while HP grows to 276. Retreat rises to 38 Sun as it roots in, and its inverted tempo sinks to near its floor — the quick opening it had as a seedling fades to a crawl. A grown one is slow but immense.
Ponderosa Pine is in the Specialist group on the succession wheel. It deals x1.5 to Competitors (perennial herbs, vines, shrubs, broadleaf trees) and takes x1.5 from the Ruderal group (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics, bulbs), whose defense resists it to x0.667.
A native conifer wall that heals every checkup and chips the foe with acidic needle litter — a durable, self-sustaining tank. It is edible (leaf), so feeding it Nitrogen pays x1.25 coins; any other nutrient banks x1.25 XP instead. The Total power gallery below marks its crossover — where its rising bulk overtakes its falling speed — at level 12; it only grows stronger with level, so never hold it back.
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.