Well, if ‘the top’ is Arena 8 in Clash Royale anyway. The climb has been very interesting, especially having two accounts to compare. My main as of right now is in Arena 8, while my second account is at 2900 trophies (100 away from Arena 8). The funny part is that my second account has had better ‘card luck’, while on my main I’ve used the same deck for months.

The two decks:

My main deck: Skeletons (9), Zap (9), Minions (9), Mini Pekka (7), Elixir Pump (6), Wizard (7), Poison (3), Golem (3).

My alt’s deck: Spear Goblins (9), Zap (9), Tombstone (6), Princess (1), Mini Pekka (6), Dark Prince (4), Witch (3), Royal Giant (10).

My main account hasn’t pulled a single legendary, while my alt has the above Princess, and also has Lava Hound (which I attempted to make work but just couldn’t). Both accounts have had a single Super Magical Chest, and my highest epic on my main is actually Mirror (4), which I also don’t use.

On my alt, in addition to getting lucky with the legendaries, I got very lucky in that my Super Magical had a large stack of Dark Prince epics, and shortly after that he was in the shop, which allowed me to buy the two remaining copies I needed to get him to level 4. Royal Giant is at level 10 because I’ve been requesting him for a long, long time in clan chat.

Across both accounts I think I’ve spent $20 or so, mostly early on to buy the $5 gold bunch when I was still trying to find a deck that worked for me. I’ve not spend money on either chests, or on gems to cycle chests faster. My main is sitting on 750ish gems, my alt on 250.

My main deck is pretty simple, get ahead in elixir either via the pump and/or defending, and once ahead hard-push behind the golem. If it goes REALLY well, a single push kills a tower, but on average I generally do 50% or so damage to it per push. Inferno tower and Sparky are the hard counters, and when facing someone decent using either, I’ll often play for a draw rather than the win.

My alt’s deck is more fun to play, because it has more ‘win condition’ options. The first is obviously via Royal Giant beatdown, where he chips away at the enemy tower and it eventually dies. But the deck also does really well counter-attacking, especially against hog-based decks. The Tombstone hard-counters hog, and often times will result in a push going the other way with the mini pekka or prince.

As I’ve mentioned before, with CR being a direct 1v1 PvP game, it allows for plenty of excuses. “The matchmaking hates you”, “You get unlucky with cards”, “You don’t spend so you can’t win”, etc. And sure, you can likely point to a few games out of the hundreds you have played where you faced someone three levels above you with lots of epics/legendaries or whatever. But those few games aren’t what is keeping you from moving up in rank. You’re actually player skill is the biggest factor, so if you do want to move up, ‘get good’.

Figure out a deck that works for you, considering the cards you have. Tweak it to counter the most popular meta decks (so as of today, anti hog and anti royal giant, at the very least). Get comfortable with how your deck is paced, the nuance of each card, and how they work/counter others. Once you have settled on your deck, plan out your requests to level up the most important cards, and plan out your gold spending via the shop to best benefit you as well.

Programming note: We have one spot open in Boom Beach, and a couple in Clash of Clans. The CR clan is full.