Reynoutria japonica
A perennial-herb Competitor whose signature invasive role is a hard-hitting attacker, while at home it plays a durable buffer.
Japanese Knotweed is a perennial-herb card. Its role flips with nativity: in East Asia — Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan, where it is native — it plays a durable buffer that soaks hits and props up the bench. Across North America, the UK and mainland Europe, where it is a notorious invader, it becomes an aggressive attacker. Most players will meet it in its invasive form.
Its kit follows the perennial-herb template: a starter attack at level 1, a free once-per-battle ability at level 10, and an advanced attack at level 18. Perennial-herb attacks are not damage-capped, so its top-end hits land at full weight. Damage tracks nativity: as a native buffer its moves deal baseline power and it wins by outlasting, while as an invasive attacker every damaging move hits roughly 1.75× harder — a real spike that ends races quickly.
Perennial-herbs carry Resprout: once per battle, a hit that would knock it out instead leaves it clinging at about 25% HP. That single saved turn is the card's backbone — it buys another attack, or the time to retreat. See abilities.
Knotweed carries no innate combat keyword. If its card is flagged toxic or thorny in the infobox, the matching poison-rider or thorns-recoil applies; otherwise treat it as a clean attacker. For field gear: as a native buffer, pair it with defensive/support gear to stretch its HP wall; as an invasive attacker, offensive gear compounds the ATK spike.
It leans on HP and a growing Def that scales with level, with a modest Sun economy and a cheap 10-Sun retreat. Native, it gets an HP ×1.15 cushion and benched natives project an HP overshield onto the active — a genuine wall. Invasive, it trades that cushion for the ATK spike and pays Faustian self-damage to its own bench on each damaging attack.
As a perennial-herb it sits in the Competitor succession group: it hits Ruderal foes (annual-forb, grass, aquatic, bulb) for ×1.5, and is resisted to ×0.667 against Specialist foes (succulent, conifer, fern, epiphyte). Other Competitors and Weird cards are neutral.
Invasive knotweed is one of the better PvE coin-farmers in this batch: the ATK spike plus uncapped hits burn through wild plants fast. Mind the downside — Faustian chip wears down your own bench, and if the knotweed itself faints it hands the opponent a bounty of extra prizes, so protect it or trade it deliberately. As a native, it is a steady buffer that anchors a bench. Its young shoots are eaten like rhubarb in the wild — but if your card is flagged edible, remember Pl@ntNet identifications can be wrong, so never eat a plant just because a scan labeled it edible.