Salix humilis
The Prairie willow (Salix humilis) is a Broadleaf tree that plays as a defensive buffer.
The Prairie willow is a small dry-ground willow. In battle it plays as a Broadleaf tree. It is native to Eastern North America and listed as invasive nowhere, so it fills the defensive buffer role only.
Its kit unlocks in three stages. The starter attack, Branch Slam, is available from Level 1 and costs 2 Sun, dealing 35 as a native and 35 as an invasive. Its effect: A heavy branch slams down.
The free ability, Shade Tolerance (Level 25), costs no Sun because it is once per battle: Waits out the dark: heal 40%, and the foe can't heal.
The advanced attack, Forest Fire (Level 40, 6 Sun), deals 35 native and 35 invasive: Takes the whole stand with it — the foe burns, and so does its own bench. Most cards you meet are well below the Level 40 snapshot these numbers are read at, and unlock their kit slot by slot as they level.
This card actually keeps two always-on traits, drawn from its category pool with the rest discarded. From Level 10 it carries Buttress Roots, a buttressed trunk that cannot be Bound. From Level 68 a second, different trait stacks on top: Heartwood Core, extra DEF that scales up with the card's level, so its core hardens as it ages. Both are working traits — there are no inert abilities in the game — and each arrives at full strength on the riser shown, so for much of the card's life it plays with only the earlier of the two.
It carries no Toxin or Thorns trait, so it inflicts no contact recoil on an attacker. A Cal-Mag (Ca/Mg) amendment stacks flat DEF onto its already-high wall, or feed it an economy fertilizer to bank coins or XP. See field gear for the full item list and nativity for how region sets its role.
Read at the Level 40 snapshot, its DEF is 18 — the hardest armor band in the game, set by its battle category and real wood density, so a mature trunk genuinely stands as an armored wall. It retreats for 16 Sun. Turn 1 is ordered by its initiative (18) and every turn after by its SPD (56). It is slow off the mark but relentless after — outpaced on the opening exchange, then pulling ahead as the fight settles. No region lists it as invasive, so it plays purely as a buffer: a +15% HP cushion (103 HP) and, from the bench, an HP overshield onto your active. It has no attacker stance. The overshield is a bench-built extra ring: up to four green HP bars from benched natives (drained by direct damage first, but bypassed by poison, recoil and splash) and up to two gold Sun bars from benched Network trees.
By Level 100 it has hardened into that wall: DEF climbs to 40 as wood density asserts itself and HP swells toward 190, while its retreat cost rises to 33 Sun — an old tree is deeply rooted and slow to pull back. Its tempo, already unhurried, has sunk to roughly 1% of cap, so it leads no exchange late; it wins by absorbing and outlasting.
It is a Competitor on the succession wheel: it crowds out Ruderals (annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs), hitting them for 1.5× and resisting their blows, but is outlasted by Specialists (succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes), which turn its 1.5× disadvantage against it. The Weird categories (carrion-aroids, carnivores, mycotrophs and vascular parasites) sit off the wheel and trade neutrally with it. See weaknesses & resistances and categories.
A native-only broadleaf-tree wall. Its Forest Fire advanced hit burns the foe at the cost of its own bench — a double-edged swing. A durable anchor with a risky finisher. It has no resolved edible part, so any fertilizer you feed it banks ×1.25 XP rather than coins — a growth boost, not an income stream. On the total-power curve its native crossover falls around Level 22: below it the card leans on its turn-order edge, above it on raw bulk and attack — it is monotonically stronger as it levels, so keep growing it.
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.