Hog Rider

Hog Rider is Clash Royale's classic 4-Elixir Rare troop: a single fast attacker who ignores every enemy unit and beelines straight for a tower or defensive building. He's cheap, hits hard, and moves quickly enough that he can be swinging on a tower before a slow defense has time to react. His signature trick is leaping over the river itself instead of crossing at a bridge, which makes his approach harder to predict and defend against. Because he can't be baited into fighting troops, players typically answer him with a defensive building or a fast, hard-hitting troop instead. He's anchored the long-running "Hog Cycle" playstyle since Clash Royale's earliest days and remains a fixture of the ladder and competitive meta a decade later.

• Hog Rider is a Rare, 4-Elixir troop that deploys as a single fast attacker, unlocked in the Builder's Workshop. At tournament standard (level 11), he has 1,697 hitpoints and swings for 317 damage on a 1.6-second hit cycle — about 198 damage per second.

• Hog Rider has been in Clash Royale since the very beginning: he was part of the limited regional soft-launch on January 4, 2016 (iOS only, in Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and a handful of Northern European countries plus New Zealand), roughly two months before the game's full worldwide release on March 2, 2016.

• His first swing is unusually fast: Hog Rider's opening hit lands just 0.6 seconds after he reaches a target, versus the normal 1.6-second gap between every hit afterward, so he squeezes in extra chip damage the instant he's in range.

• He's also one of the fastest troops on the battlefield, moving at the game's top "Very Fast" speed tier and deploying in about 1 second, so he's already sprinting for the bridge moments after being placed.

• Hog Rider only attacks buildings — towers and defensive structures — and completely ignores enemy troops, so dropping a random unit in front of him won't make him stop and fight; he'll just path around it. He still takes damage from anything that attacks him along the way, including troops.

• He can leap straight over the river instead of crossing at a bridge, which lets him cut through the middle of the map where buildings placed only near the bridges won't catch him. While he's airborne mid-jump, ground troops can't target him — he'll even sail clean over a thrown Log.

• The standard way to shut him down is a defensive building — Cannon, Tesla, Bomb Tower, Tombstone, and Inferno Tower are all popular picks to pull him off course — usually backed up by a spell like The Log or a hard-hitting troop such as Mini P.E.K.K.A. to finish him off before he lands more than a couple of hits.

• Hog Rider's own stats haven't been touched in any of Clash Royale's 2026 balance updates. Supercell has instead trimmed cards that pair well with him twice this year — Hero Ice Golem's freeze effect was scaled back in both March and August 2026, with the developers citing the same concern each time: it was, in their words from the August patch, "too oppressive when combined with Hog Rider."