Goblin Barrel

Goblin Barrel is a 3-Elixir spell that throws a barrel to any spot on the map. It deals no damage itself, but bursts open on landing to drop three ground-only melee Goblins (202 HP / 125 damage each at tournament standard) right at the target point, letting them bypass defenders and threaten a Crown Tower directly. Its Evolution simultaneously throws a second, decoy barrel to the mirrored spot in the opposite lane, producing three much weaker "Decoy Goblins" so the defender can't be sure which lane holds the real threat until it's too late.

• Goblin Barrel is a 3-Elixir Epic spell that throws a barrel to any point on the battlefield, including right next to a Crown Tower. The barrel itself deals no damage on impact — it simply bursts open and drops three Goblins exactly where it lands, letting them skip past front-line defenders and go straight for a tower.

• At tournament standard, each of the three Goblins has 202 hitpoints and swings for 125 damage — about 114 damage per second — with melee range and Very Fast movement speed, though they can only target ground units. Their very first swing after landing comes in just 0.4 seconds, far quicker than their normal 1.1-second hit speed, so they can sneak in extra damage on a squishy defender or land a free chip hit on a tower before the opponent reacts. The barrel itself takes 1.1 seconds to deploy once played.

• Goblin Barrel debuted on 4 January 2016 during Clash Royale's early regional soft launch, ahead of the game's worldwide release that March. It didn't stay untouched for long: on 11 January 2016, the game's very first balance update knocked one level off the Goblins it spawns, since a max-level Barrel at the time was throwing Goblins two full levels above the normal troop cap.

• The single biggest change in Goblin Barrel's history landed on 4 July 2016, when a Tournaments Update cut its cost from 4 Elixir down to 3, removed the direct damage the barrel used to deal on impact, and slightly slowed the Goblins' spawn-in timing to compensate. That cost cut is what turned Goblin Barrel into the cheap, efficient bait spell it's still known as today.

• In a May 2019 balance update, Supercell trimmed Goblin Barrel's deploy time from 1.2 seconds to 1.1 seconds specifically to give it faster attacks on Towers, letting the barrel burst open and release its Goblins slightly sooner after being thrown.

• Goblin Barrel's landing radius is just 1.5 tiles — one of the smallest of any spell in the game — so all three Goblins spawn bunched tightly together. That makes them an easy wipe for small area-damage spells: The Log is a near-perfect answer, killing all three Goblins with a single card and chipping any tank pushing behind them, which is exactly the interaction that built 'Log Bait' into one of Clash Royale's longest-running deck archetypes.

• Evolutionplaying two ordinary Goblin Barrels charges up the Evolution, so the third Goblin Barrel thrown in a match automatically becomes the Evolved version. It throws a second, decoy barrel at the same time to the mirror-image spot in the opposite lane, and while both are in the air the opponent has no way to tell which one holds the real Goblins. The decoy barrel releases three lookalike Decoy Goblins with only 81 hitpoints — about 60% less than a real Goblin's 202 — hitting for 66 damage per swing, or roughly 60 damage per second, so guessing wrong still only costs the defender a fight against a much weaker group.

• Evolutionthe Decoy Goblins' damage has been cut twice since Goblin Barrel Evolution's debut in mid-2024. Supercell dropped it from 120 to 89 in July 2025, explaining that two equally-threatening barrels landing at once were 'extremely hard for players to deal with,' then cut it again from 89 to 66 in August 2026 — so today's Decoy Goblins hit for close to half of what they did when the Evolution first launched.