Polystichum acrostichoides
A woodland fern that trades soft armour for a ×1.5 edge against the game's many Competitor cards.
Christmas fern is an evergreen woodland fern native to eastern North America and western North America and invasive in Europe. As a fern it is a soft-bodied Specialist — which means it hits Competitor cards (herbs, vines, shrubs, trees) for ×1.5, a useful niche.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Smothering Spores, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — A spore mat settles and saps the foe. It lands for 27 damage as a native buffer and 27 as an invasive attacker. The free once-per-battle ability, Gametophyte Rest, comes online at level 25: Falls back on the hidden generation: heal 35%. The advanced attack, Silica Shatter, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 43 native / 43 invasive — Silica-loaded fronds shatter on impact.
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. Note that its Unpalatable recoil is one of the few things a Sulfur amendment neutralises — worth knowing if you face it. A Calcium/Magnesium amendment is the main way to firm its thin armour. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 2 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 26 against its native 26 — 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 47 / 47, and retreat stiffens to 33 Sun as it roots down. DEF barely leaves its soft band even so (3) — 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 2b — it should come through winters that bottom out near -40 °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 -8.8 °C to a warm edge of 26.0 °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 Specialist. It strikes Competitor cards — perennial herbs, vines, shrubs and trees — for ×1.5 damage, and takes ×1.5 in return from Ruderal cards — annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs. Every other matchup is neutral.
Lean on its type advantage: as a Specialist it punches Competitor cards for ×1.5, so it is a good answer to the many herb, vine, shrub and tree cards. Unpalatable taxes attackers on contact, and Prothallial Reserve gives it a late second-life chance. Its own damage is capped low and its body soft, so use it as a matchup pick and coin earner rather than a general-purpose carry. 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.