Potamogeton illinoensis
Illinois pondweed (*Potamogeton illinoensis*) is a native-only aquatic plant that plays as a defensive buffer.
Illinois pondweed (Potamogeton illinoensis) is an aquatic plant, a soft, fast-cycling ruderal in battle terms. It is native to Eastern North America, Western North America and South America and invasive nowhere on the map, so it only ever fields its native, defensive form — there is no attacker version of this card. Read across the fight it is a quick starter that leads the opening turn, then eases to a steadier pace.
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 aquatic plant. 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), 2 DEF, tempo of 38 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 (2 at the snapshot level), the low aquatic plant 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. See stats for the full model.
Grown to the cap, its HP swells to 190 but its DEF barely leaves the soft band it started in (3) — biomass without armor, the signature of a soft-bodied aquatic plant. The retreat cost rises to 33 Sun, and the inverted tempo that made it quick when young has fallen to roughly 1% of cap. It ends the climb as a big health pool that still takes hits on the chin, so it wants recovery and positioning rather than a trading war.
By category it belongs to the Ruderal succession group. On the type wheel, Ruderal deals extra damage to Specialist plants (succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes) and takes extra from Competitor plants (perennial herbs, vines, shrubs and broadleaf trees); 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.
With no invasive form, it is purely a defender: park it as a native on the bench to feed the overshield, or lead with it as a durable body. In absolute terms this is a fragile card: a fine coin-earner and collection piece in single-player, but it wants backup on the bench rather than carrying a fight alone. It is inedible, so any fertilizer you feed it banks ×1.25 XP — a steady way to level a collection piece. Leveling steadily trades falling turn-order speed for rising bulk and attack: it fights as a fast skirmisher up to about Level 25, 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.