Giant Skeleton

Giant Skeleton is a Medium-speed, high-hitpoint Epic ground tank whose real threat is his death: when he finally goes down, he drops a bomb that explodes into a large area-damage burst a few seconds later. A May 2026 rework shifted that bomb away from being a Crown-Tower-killing gamble and into a much harder-hitting anti-swarm tool, while separate 2025-2026 patches sped up his attacks and boosted his raw damage.

• Giant Skeleton is a 6-Elixir Epic troop built to soak up damage: at level 11 he has 3,361 hitpoints, among the highest of any single-target troop in the game. He hits for 276 damage on a 1.3-second swing timer, which works out to roughly 212 damage per second, and like other melee troops he fights only ground targets from point-blank range while moving at a medium pace.

• Giant Skeleton's very first attack is unusually fast: it lands just 0.3 seconds after he's ready to fight, compared with the 1.3 seconds between all of his following swings. That gives him a quick opening hit most troops can't match, letting him get a strike in before an enemy he's charging into — or one charging into him — gets a chance to hit back first.

• Giant Skeleton's real threat is his death. When he's finally killed, he drops a bomb that explodes 3 seconds later for a massive burst of area damage — 688 at level 11 — centered on where he fell. That blast has one of the largest splash radii of any card in the game, and it hits both air and ground units, so it can catch flying troops in the explosion even though the living Giant Skeleton could never touch them while he was still swinging.

• Supercell reworked Giant Skeleton's death bomb in May 2026. His hitpoints were trimmed by 7% and his body was made 25% smaller, making him a harder target for splash damage, while the bomb itself was rebalanced: its damage against troops went up 29%, but its damage against Crown Towers was cut by 36%, wiping out the old bonus that let it deal exactly double damage to towers. The goal was to make the bomb pay off more often on defense rather than living or dying by whether it happened to catch a tower.

• Giant Skeleton's damage was buffed 4% in July 2025, rising from 266 to 276. Supercell's stated reasoning was that he wasn't getting enough value before his bomb went off, and the extra bite was meant to help him compete with tankier troops like P.E.K.K.A. and Mega Knight.

• A January 2026 balance update sped up Giant Skeleton's attacks, cutting the time between hits from 1.4 seconds to 1.3 seconds. Supercell's reasoning was that although he was a dependable defensive tank, he struggled to apply pressure once he went on offense and was too easy to distract — the faster swing was meant to help him clear swarms and fight back more effectively.

• Giant Skeleton was already a top-tier tank in Clash Royale's first couple of years. His damage was buffed 20% in mid-2016 and another 8% that December, then his hitpoints got an additional 5% boost in December 2017 — three separate buffs inside two years that helped cement him as one of the game's premier defensive tanks during its early meta.