Clash Royale Deck Building Guidelines With Any Cards

Clash Royale Deck Building Guidelines With Any Cards by supyonamesjosh

I come from a Magic the Gathering background, and in magic you can generally segregate decks into two different types:

1. Synergy Decks
2. Good Stuff Decks

Synergy decks are decks that contain cards that are weak alone, but combined with other cards can become very powerful. Good Stuff decks just contain strong cards. Despite the lack of synergies, good stuff decks are often times extremely powerful because they contain the best cards available. This same segregation can also be seen in Clash Royale, as there are many different synergy decks running around:

1. Synergy Decks – “Hog Freeze” “Prince-Dark Prince” “Hut Spam” “Buildings”

This guide however, is not about synergy decks. This is a blueprint for building a top tier Good Stuff deck.

How good is a Clash Royale good stuff deck? Shouldn’t I use a synergy deck instead?

As a background, this is the blueprint I followed from Arena 1 to Arena 7. At around 2200 trophies I switched to Hog-Freeze but I have since fallen back to this blueprint as the meta has become more building heavy. Most importantly, this guide doesn’t assume you have a high level hinge epic like freeze or prince that many synergy decks require. Although not necessarily as powerful as some of the synergy decks, this guide can be used by anyone, and if you are below 2500 then this will be more than adequate.

The basis of the guide – fill rolls, not specific cards.

The key to this guide, is that I am not going to tell you what cards to use. What cards you use should be completely dependent on which cards you have, which cards are the highest level, and which cards you like playing. Instead I am going to break down 6 slots you need to fill, and outline some possibilities for the wild card slots

The makeup of the good stuff deck: Slots to Fill:

Here are your 8 card slots for this deck. I will outline some ideas for each one individually below:

1. Tank
2. Cheap card to support the tank
3. Ranged Attacker that can hit air units
4. AOE Damage Unit
5. AOE Damage Spell
6. Building
7. Wild Card #1 – (Deck Weakness fill in)
8. Wild Card #2 – (Splashy Epic or Meta Call)

1. Tank: The backbone of the deck.

• Possible Cards: Giant, Giant Skeleton, PEKKA, Golem
• My Progression – Giant to A1-A4. Giant Skeleton A5-A6. Golem 6-7

Without a synergy to push through damage, you absolutely need a big body to take hits while the rest of your units do damage. Obviously you are going to start with Giant as it is the only non epic, but where you go after that is completely up to you. They are all pretty good at doing their job.

2. Cheap tank support.

• Possible Cards: Goblins, Goblin Spearmen, Skeleton, Archers
• My Progression: Goblin Spearmen A1-A6. Goblins A7

This is the cheap card you can instantly deploy behind your tank to start hitting things. It needs to be cheap enough that your tank+this card costs you under 10 elixer.

3. Ranged Attacker that can hit air units

• Possible Cards: Musketeer, Archers, Wizard, Ice Wizard, Goblin Spearmen
• My progression Musketeer A1-A7

You know what is really sucky? Watching a balloon coming at you and realizing you are stone dead to it. You 100% need a card that can hit air units. As you can tell I am a huge fan of the Musketeer, and used it the entire way. Anything that stops you from being stone dead to air is fine however.

4. AOE Damage Unit

• Possible Cards: Skeleton Bomber, Valkyrie, Dragon, Wizard, Ice Wizard, Witch (Possibly an AOE damage building like bomb tower if you are feeling off the rails)
• My Progression – A1-A4 Witch A5 – A6 Wizard A7 Dragon

AOE, or area of effect, is any unit that can take out multiple units at once. At low levels it is necessary to protect your units from skeleton armies and even at high levels they are necessary for taking out cheap grouped units such as minions or goblins. You want to have some card in your arsenal that can deal with a wave of units coming at you.

5. AOE Damage Spell

• Possible Cards – Arrows, Fireball, Zap, (Possibly Poison? Not enough experience)
• My Progression – Fireball A1-A5, Zap A5-A6, Arrows A6-A7

Anything that can take out a swarm of enemies on the other side of the map easily can be used here (which means I recommend against narrow spells like lightning or slow spells like rocket for this slot) I started with fireball because I thought I was good enough that the small area window wasn’t a big deal, but switched to zap because of the faster cast time and then arrows to take out minion hoards and princesses. This is another category where you should go with whatever you are most comfortable with. All 3 are great.

6 Building

• Possible Cards – Any building really.
• My Progression A1-A5 None (and I got crushed by hogriders) A6-A7 Elixer Collector

The main purpose of having at least one building is to avoid getting crushed by hogriders. Now that you have a building in your deck there are a ton of options to choose from. In early arenas I would consider Skeleton Graveyard as a counter to prince, but in later arenas where there are less princes (or if you are good enough at dealing with princes that you don’t mind them) I would move to Bomb Tower or Inferno Tower depending on whether you are struggling with swarms or tanks. Elixer Collector at A6 is always a solid choice at well but not everyone has that option as it isn’t available until then.

7. Wild Card #1 Deck Weakness fill in

• Possible Cards – A card to deal with what you are going to struggle against
• My Progression – Barbarians ??-A7

I don’t remember exactly when I added in Barbarians to my deck. But it was to deal with the hogriders that were crushing me around A4-A5. (Remember I had no buildings at the time) This card is up to you completely! If you think your deck is completely solid against everything then treat this slot like the second Wild Card slot

8 Wild Card #2 – Splashy Epic or Meta Call

• Possible Cards – Prince, Freeze, Mirror, Skeleton Army, Goblin Barrel, Lightning, A second building (For Hog riders), Rocket (For finishers or building decks)
• My Progression – Prince A1-A6 Bomb Tower A7

Did you open 14 Freezes from a Super Magical Chest? Play it here! Getting mad at hut spammers and want to win that matchup no matter what? Play rocket here! This is your cardslot to play your favorite card or your card that you opened 14 of.

Note on CardSlots:

It is possible for a card to fill more than one roll. For example I would consider the Wizard as both an AOE damage unit and a ranged attacker. In cases such as that I would probably put in a second unit that also fit one of the criteria so you don’t rely on one unit so heavily for multiple roles. Up to you though.

Thanks for reading the guide. If you found it helpful let me know and I might work on expanding it more in the future. I thought it was important to put a guide out there that could be used as a blueprint for anyone in any situation.