Potamogeton amplifolius
A native-only aquatic that fights as a fast, poison-and-anoxia controller — no attacker role, but a genuinely quick cruiser that speeds up as it's worn down.
Largeleaf pondweed is an aquatic card that plays as a fast controller, choking the foe with poison and healing-denial. It is native to Eastern and Western North America and is invasive nowhere, so it is a native-only card: it takes the native buffer role and has no attacker profile at all. Frame it purely as a native or neutral pick.
Three stages of kit (moves):
Because it is native-only, its power reads the same in any arena. No move carries an initiative rider, so turn order rides purely on tempo.
Its trait schedule keeps two always-on abilities:
For most of its life it has only Heterophylly; Waterlogged is a very late, double-edged addition.
It holds no Toxin or Thorns trait, so it is safe to strike. It is not a climber, so it is not Moss Pole eligible. A calcium/magnesium field gear amendment adds flat DEF to its soft aquatic floor if you want it to survive longer on the board.
At the Lv 40 snapshot (stats): HP 103, ATK 26, DEF 2 (soft), retreat 16 Sun. On tempo it is the opposite of the succulents above — a slow starter and a fast cruiser: initiative 32 is modest, so it often moves second on turn one, but its sustained speed 51 is very high, so it takes over the turn order from turn two onward, and Heterophylly pushes it faster still once hurt. Benched as a native, it projects an HP overshield onto your active.
It grows into a big-HP, low-armor body like most soft categories: HP 190, ATK 48, but DEF only 3 — never a wall. Retreat rises to 33 Sun, and its inverted tempo, sky-high when young, has sunk to roughly 1% of cap by Lv 100, so the mature card is slow — the reverse of the fast skirmisher it starts as. Maturity buys it bulk and Waterlogged's immunities at the cost of ever being healed.
Aquatics are in the Ruderal succession group (weaknesses & resistances): ×1.5 into Specialists (succulent, conifer, fern, epiphyte), ×1.5 taken from Competitors (perennial-herb, vine, shrub, broadleaf-tree), neutral against other Ruderals and the Weird categories.
This is a solid single-player controller for its rarity: cheap Surge damage, a saturating Poison that ignores DEF and the overshield, and blanket healing-denial let it grind down bulkier opponents that would out-trade it in raw stats. Its high sustained speed means it usually gets the last word each round. The catch is that it is native-only, so it is a buffer/controller and never an aggressive invader, and Waterlogged locks it out of healing late — lean on its Poison and speed, not on recovery. It is inedible, so fertilizer banks ×1.25 XP rather than coins. It plays as a fast skirmisher until about Lv 29, then its bulk carries it; leveling always makes it stronger, so never hold it back. Test its poison clock in the battle lab.
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.