Clash Royale Ice Spirit Guide

Clash Royale Ice Spirit Guide by Smoothtaffy

Hey guys, just recently began using the ice spirit and jumped 350 trophies (3250-3600) in only a few days.

Here is my deck:

Lava hound (main tank and damage from pups)
Miner (tanks for pups, takes out air defense like wizards and princess)
Princess (ranged air splash damage, one shots minions with help from zap, arrow bait)
Mini pekka (great on defense and offense due to high damage)
Minions (send behind hound for damage and arrow bait before pups appear)
Fireball (great against barbs and kills a huge lava hound threat in the three musketeers with zap or a princess shot)
Zap (great utility spell)
Ice spirit (use to make princess or minions zappable and for defense against hogrider and Royal giant, great 2 sec freeze for one elixir, allows you to cycle through cards quickly)

I also sometimes use cannon or furnace in place of ice spirit, but ice spirit is my favorite because it’s so inexpensive.

Deck cost: 3.4

I run a lava miner deck that differs slightly from the popular one on the leaderboards at the moment and my most recent change to the deck of going from the cannon to the ice spirit has done really well helping me reach a new trophy high. So here is my take on why the ice spirit is such a great card and how it can be used effectively.

Deck cost/cycling

At one elixir the ice spirit is similar to skeletons in that it allows the user to quickly cycle back through their cards. My main sources of defense are mini pekka and minions and if I’d just used one of these on offense I used to struggle with their counterpush. Now I can easily cycle back to these core cards when in a pinch. This also helps with cycling back through to zap to stop prince charges, sparky shots and is a lifesaver against zap bait goblin barrell/minion horde decks.

2 second freeze effect

For one elixir you get a 2 second freeze which is about half the length of the freeze spell for a quarter of the cost. This is especially effective in the following situations:

• a lone mini pekka can be countered with the ice spirit for a positive 3 elixir trade with no damage if times correctly
• a hogrider can be held to one or zero shots when countered with ice spirit and high damage troops like minions and mini pekka
• a tank followed by a mini pekka often can lead to trouble as your own mini pekka targets the tank while your opponents takes yours out. By using the ice spirit and zap on their tank mini pekka combo your mini pekka can shred their tank and trade evenly with their mini pekka and stop a potentially catastrophic push
• resetting prince charges is what this does best in my opinion. Recently I played two sets of level 6 double prince combos and neither one caused me any problem because the ice spirits large splash radius freezes both princes allowing my mini pekka or minions to easily take them out (zap helps for double prince, not needed for a lone prince)

Making swarms one shotable

Many swarm cards such as barbarians and minions are designed to not be one shotted by counters like mini pekka (barbs) and zap or princess (minions). The ice spirit makes it so these cards can be one shotted by their respective counters. For barbarians a mini pekka with ice spirit can take down barbarians in 4 mini pekka hits (often allowing the mini pekka to get a shot off on the opponents next troop or tower). The mini pekka also takes minimal damage because the barbarians are frozen for 2 seconds and not dealing any damage. For minions, the ice spirit only works if they are targeting another troop or they will die, but this allows them to be zappable or for them to die in one princess shot. This can prevent tons of damage given the princess’s slow 3 second attack speed.

Some situations where the ice spirit is not ideal/doesn’t work.

• Ranged troops like musketeers and wizards are very hard to freeze with the ice spirit given that they out range it. You must allow them to lock onto a different troop first and then deploy the ice spirit.
• Ice spirits do not one shot any troops other than skeletons on their own. Goblins and minions will survive with minimal health.
• Against fire spirits, in my experience only one fire spirit will die to the ice spirit and two fire spirits will continue onwards.

Thanks for reading! Hope more people will begin to use this great troop. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Edit: musketeer does not kill ice spirit in one shot sorry been playing mainly overleveled cards since I climbed trophies thanks for fact checking, it’s fast hit speed and range is what has caused me problems

Second edit: Wrote this at 12 last night so most of these findings are taken from my experience in game play, If there is a statistic that doesn’t check out please leave in the comments. I’m not trying to be like OJ (clearly the best at what he does) I just thought I’d leave some insights

Third edit: From my experience, i play ice spirit every 10-15 games but legendaries every game and hogrider and Royal giant every 2-4 games. By calling the ice spirit underrated I’m saying it is on tier with these cards and I should be seeing it as frequently but am not.