Guards

Guards is a 3-Elixir Epic card that drops three shielded, sword-and-board skeleton troops in front of you. Each one moves at a fast pace, hits with a longer reach than most melee troops, and carries a shield that has to be broken before its real, very low health is exposed. That shield is what makes the card valuable: it soaks up one big hit for free, so Guards is usually held back and dropped reactively to counter a single hard-hitting attacker rather than used to start a push. Once the shields are gone, the troops underneath are fragile, so splash damage and cheap spells clean them up fast.

• Guards is a 3-Elixir Epic troop card, released 3 May 2016, that deploys three shielded, sword-and-board skeleton warriors at once. It's unlocked in the P.E.K.K.A.'s Playhouse arena.

• Each Guard fights behind its own shield with 256 hit points at tournament level 11 — more than triple the Guard's own 81 hit points underneath, an unusually large shield relative to its body. A Guard's shield has to be fully broken before its real health starts dropping, and because the shield and body are handled as separate pools within a single hit, even a devastating spell like Lightning only tears through a Guard's shield instead of killing it outright.

• At tournament level 11, each Guard deals 117 damage per hit on a 1-second attack cycle, which works out to 117 damage per second. Guards also swing unusually fast right out of the gate — the first attack lands just 0.5 seconds after they're ready instead of waiting out the usual full cycle — which helps them get a hit in quickly when dropped on defense.

• Guards move at Fast speed, target only ground troops, and swing with a 'Long' melee range of 1.6 tiles — noticeably longer reach than the 1.2-tile range most melee troops (like Knight) get — letting a Guard land the first hit in a lot of head-on fights.

• Guards shine on defense against heavy-hitting attackers — Mini P.E.K.K.A., P.E.K.K.A., Prince, Dark Prince, Bandit, and Sparky are commonly-cited examples — because a Guard's shield soaks up the opening hit, and since each of the three Guards needs at least two strikes to go down, a slow, hard-hitting attacker can end up needing six hits just to clear the whole squad.

• Once a Guard's shield is gone, the health left underneath is tiny, so splash-damage troops and spells clean up the whole trio fast: Valkyrie, Executioner, Wizard, and Bomber punish Guards on defense, The Log or Poison can wipe the squad off the board entirely, and even a cheap card like Fire Spirit can pop a shield for a profitable trade.

• Guards shows up most often in cycle, control, and bridge-spam decks, where it's held in hand as a cheap, efficient answer to a single-target push rather than led with — and whatever survives on defense can still be thrown forward afterward for a bit of extra chip damage on the tower.

• Guards' damage was reduced from 122 to 117 per hit in a May 2025 balance update — the only balance change the card has received since launch. No update since, including the most recent one in August 2026, has touched Guards again.