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Season 18 - Balance Changes, Mother Witch (New Card), Seasonal Content
Info and reasons behind balance changes scheduled for December 7, and highlights about seasonal content for Pass Royale.
Update 2020-12-09: Clan Wars 2 Matchmaking Changes
Season 18: Logmas
Clash Royale Season 18 begins on Monday, December 7th, 2020.
Tower Skins
There are two tower skins for this season — one from Pass Royale and another at the shop.
Clashmas Sled tower skin. Pass Royale at Tier 10.
Logmas tower skin. Shop.
Emotes
The Log: Logmas. Free for all players at Tier 5.
Bowler Gift. Pass Royale at Tier 20.
Bowler Sad. Shop.
Mother Witch Laugh. Shop.
Lumberjack Logmas. Challenge.
Emotes in Action
Logmas Arena
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Mother Witch (New Card)
Mother Witch places a curse on enemy Troops with each attack. When a cursed Troop is destroyed, it turns into a building-targeting Hog that fights alongside the Mother Witch! She also bakes great cookies.
Gameplay
Stats
| Rarity | Legendary |
| Elixir | 4 |
| Sight Range | 5.5 |
| Range | 5.5 |
| Speed | 60 Medium |
| Hit Time | 1.2 sec |
| Deploy Time | 1.0 sec |
| Effect Duration | 5.5 sec |
| Targets | Air + Ground |
Stats Per Level
| Level | Hitpoints | Damage | DPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 (Tournament) | 560 | 96 | 80 |
| 10 | 616 | 105 | 88 |
| 11 | 677 | 116 | 97 |
| 12 | 744 | 127 | 106 |
| 13 (Max) | 817 | 140 | 117 |
| 14 | 879 | 150 | 125 |
Balance Changes
Balances will be live on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020. Discuss on Reddit
X-Bow (Rework)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Life Time | 40 sec | 30 sec |
| Hit Time | 0.25 sec | 0.30 sec |
| Health | 1383 | 1330 |
| Damage | 26 | 34 |
- X-Bow will be getting a complete rework in December.
- Since the very beginning, it has been one of the most polarizing cards in the game.
- Although it has a steep learning curve for beginners, X-Bow is deadly in the hands of those who have mastered it.
- Its defensive capabilities make it difficult for opponent to break through.
- The rework focuses on reducing its health and life time, thus making it more fragile when placed on the battlefield.
- In turn, its bolts are more powerful than ever, with each bolt gaining 30% more damage per hit.
Guards (Rework)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Hit Time | 1.1 sec | 1.0 sec |
| Health | 90 | 67 |
- Guards will receive a rework.
- Their Hit Time and Health will be changed to be the same as Skeletons.
- This will give them an overall DPS buff.
- After their shields are broken though, they will be as fragile as their shield-less bone brothers.
Goblin Giant (Buff)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Hit Time | 1.7 sec | 1.5 sec |
- Goblin Giant is getting a minor buff to offset all the nerfs included in this season.
Witch (Buff)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Spawn | 3.5 sec | 1 sec |
- Although popular in lower arenas, Witch struggles to find her place at Top Ladder and challenges.
- She consistently ranks the lowest in terms of usage and win rates.
- Players often find more value playing other cards in the game than spending 5 elixir on this card.
- She will be getting a buff by being able to spawn her skeletons more quickly (up from 3.5 seconds now to 1 second initial spawn).
- With this change, Supercell hopes that she will become part of the meta again as a strong counter to Pekka decks.
Bats (Buff)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| First Hit | 0.8 sec | 0.6 sec |
- Bats got a nerf a few seasons ago, and the balance team felt that they are unjust — so they are returning some of the nerfed stats.
- This is an indirect buff to Night Witch as well.
Barbarian Hut (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Health -22% | 1452 | 1144 |
- This highly defensive building is often utilized by decks which depend on “chilling” during single-elixir time.
- In turn, this defensive style of play leads to an unpleasant meta that is not fun to play against.
- For the upcoming season, this meat-shield will be getting a significant nerf so players can’t just sit back and sip coffee until double-elixir time to battle.
Graveyard (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Spawn | 2.0 sec | 2.2 sec |
- The Clash Royale balance team has tried to nerf Graveyard in Season 17 — unsuccessfully — and decided to revert the change two weeks later in the November client update.
- However, they recognize that Graveyard consistently ranks at the top of all the win-conditions, and so they have decided to nerf it in a different way.
- Starting from next season, Graveyard will take a bit longer for its first Skeleton to appear, which results in 1 fewer Skeleton spawn overall.
Heal Spirit (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Damage -69% | 91 | 28 |
- This single-elixir cheery spirit has received not one — but two — nerfs recently: Season 15, Season 16 but it remains strong and its usage rate never really went down.
- Its healing ability combined with how effective it is to counter swarms like Skeleton Army and Goblin Gang makes the card a must-have in almost every single meta deck — which just shows how strong it really was when it was first introduced.
- It is receiving a very significant damage nerf — not only will it not be able to kill Skeletons anymore, using Zap in combination with Heal Spirit will not kill a Minion Horde either.
- With so many swarm cards in the meta right now, players will need to make a conscious decision to include this card for its healing ability alone. We anticipate a fairly significant drop in its usage rate for the December season.
Fisherman (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Health -10% | 800 | 720 |
- Fisherman has been very popular in the meta. How popular? Just look at all those meta decks with Fisherman + Hunter + Heal Spirit!
- His pulling mechanism is what makes him unique, and the balance team does not want to tweak those numbers. (In fact, previous attempts at nerfing his hook range has made him unplayable).
- He will be getting a health reduction and that makes him more fragile against other mini tanks.
Electro Wizard (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Damage -2.5% | 93 | 91 |
- Technically a rounding error fix.
- This minor damage nerf is intended to fix a few interactions — such as making the entry Zap and additional attack not have enough damage output to kill both Archers.
Skeleton Barrel (Nerf)
 |
Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Health -19% | 540 | 440 |
- If you’ve played against Double-Barrel decks, you know how annoying this card is!
- It gives a guaranteed tower damage towards your tower even if you have a perfect counter. To make things worse, you won’t usually want to counter this card with your perfect counter because then you won’t be able to counter some other bait cards that will deal a ton more damage!
- After the balance changes, Skeleton Barrel will have the same health as Skeleton Dragons / Magic Archer / Zappies (440 at tournament-standard).
- When cast on its own, it will still deal damages to the tower if you don’t defend it, but you should be able make it explode sooner before it reaches the tower.
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Balance Changes Frequency - From Monthly to Quarterly
We’ve saved the most important news last — this is the last season when we will see monthly balance changes. Starting in 2021, balance changes will happen every quarter (every 3 months) instead of every month.
This change may come as a surprise to many players, who see the monthly balance changes as a shake-up to month-long metas that can get stale and repetitive. The Clash Royale team did not make this decision lightly, and we will try our best to explain why they’ve decided to do this. What you can expect is that balance updates will in turn become more impactful — instead of tweaking 4-5 cards every month, you should expect to see 10-20 changes during the quarterly balances.
Player Progression
We know that many of you have asked for more frequent balance changes, but according to Supercell, for the vast majority of the players — casual or otherwise — balance changes aren’t that exciting. In fact, because of how difficult it is to progress your player account in Clash Royale, balance changes often completely ruin the players’ ability to push further. Many players simply quit the game entirely when they see that there is no way for them to achieve new heights with the deck that they have maxed — and it’s a big ask for them to spend another year to upgrade the cards they need to play another archetype, not to mention that it is equally easy for those cards to get axed in future balances.
So quarterly balance will attempt to balance the reality somewhat. Supercell has promised that they will fix their progression system in the coming year — an overhaul is planned for Q1 2021. But until this new progression system takes shape, balance changes will happen every three months so players won’t be affected by this change as much.
Development Time
Most of the players don’t realize this, but it takes a fairly significant amount of time and resources to do balancing properly. After spending more than 2.5 years on monthly balances, the team has found that the monthly balances can sometimes feel like a burden — it became a must-do-task instead of something with the pure intention of balancing problematic cards. Valuable time that could be utilized elsewhere — such as improving the game — was forced into balancing for the sake of balancing. In turn, some balances feel “arbitrary” without relevant justifications for them.
Problematic cards
Although balances will happen every quarter, problematic cards will still be dealt with swiftly. So no worries if you feel that you will now be stuck with playing against OP cards for 3 months — if a card got over-nerfed or over-buffed, the team will implement balance changes to deal with them quickly.
Why now?
When Supercell originally started doing monthly balance changes more than 2.5 years ago, their intention was to introduce some freshness due to the lack of updates. These balances have become an even bigger deal during the 2020-update drought.
For 2021, the team is committed to having more frequent game updates — currently scheduled to happen every 3 months! Their intention is to have the balance changes go with these quarterly game updates, and we’re told that they will be bigger and more impactful than what we are used to right now.
Clan Wars 2 Matchmaking Changes
This went live after maintenance on Wednesday, December 9th
- Players are now more likely to matched against opponents with similar King Level.
- Matchmaking pools have been widened across Clan War Leagues. It is now possible for players in the Bronze League to be matched against players in the Legendary League if it means that the matchup will be fairer.
- Matchmaking times will now be shorter for players that were experiencing long wait times.
Feedback
What do you think about these changes? Tell us what you think on Reddit
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TV Royale
Pass Royale Giveaway Winners
To celebrate the launch of Mother Witch, we ran a giveaway for 10 Pass Royale on Twitter courtesy of Supercell! Here are the 10 lucky winners!
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