Quercus laceyi
A native-only Texan oak that walls on defence and can flush back from a killing blow once mature.
Lacey oak is a Texan hill-country oak native to eastern North America and western North America and invasive nowhere on record — a native-only wall with a large health floor. It is one of the slowest cards here, but as a tree it barely cares. Its acorns make it an edible fruit.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Raysteal, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Takes the light by force — strike and heal 10%. It lands for 29 damage. The free once-per-battle ability, Nurse Log, comes online at level 25: The fallen feed the next: heal 25%, even the bench, and call back the lost. The advanced attack, Leaf Me Tree, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 29 — Sheds and regrows — heal 25%.
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 carries no growth-habit that makes it Moss Pole-eligible. A Calcium/Magnesium soil amendment adds flat DEF, which suits a card built to hold ground; see field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 140 HP with 30 DEF, 19 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 23 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 18 SPD (every turn after). It holds no invasive range in any tracked region, so it is a native-only card: it plays as a buffer, taking a +15% health cushion and, while benched, projecting a green overshield bar onto your active. There is no attacker scenario to build for it. 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 276 (native) / 240 (invasive), attack to 28 / 28, and retreat stiffens to 41 Sun as it roots down. DEF climbs to 70 — a genuine wall, the reward for being a tree — while the inverted tempo has sunk to roughly 1% of cap, so it wins fights by outlasting, not by moving first. It is monotonically stronger the higher it levels; the tempo it loses is only a small turn-order lever.
Roughly USDA zone 6b — it should come through winters that bottom out near -18 °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 5.0 °C to a warm edge of 28.4 °C, a Subtropical 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.
Play it as a defensive anchor: big health, high DEF, Tannin Load to sap attackers, and from level 68 Epicormic Buds give it a 35% chance to cling on at 35% health after an otherwise-lethal hit — a tree that flushes new buds after fire. It is very slow, so it will usually act last, but its bulk lets it soak the wait. Low attack, wins by outlasting. As an edible, its matching fruit fertilizer (Phosphorus) pays ×1.25 coins. A durable collection and battle card.
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.