Inferno Tower

Inferno Tower is a 5-Elixir defensive building that locks onto a single enemy and burns it down with a beam that hits harder the longer the connection holds. Left alone for even a couple of seconds, it deals more damage than almost anything else in Clash Royale, which makes it the classic answer to slow, high-health tanks like Golem, Giant, or P.E.K.K.A. That strength comes with a real weakness: the beam only ever touches one target, so it struggles against swarms, and stunning it with Zap, Lightning, or similar effects knocks its damage straight back down to the weakest stage. It's also not a permanent fixture — like other buildings it slowly loses health on its own over time and will eventually self-destruct if it isn't destroyed in battle first.

• At tournament standard (level 11), Inferno Tower has 1,748 hitpoints and pours damage into whatever single enemy it's locked onto through three escalating stages: roughly 107 damage per second when it first opens fire, climbing to about 395 damage per second a couple of seconds later, and finally spiking to around 2,117 damage per second once fully charged — enough to erase almost any tank in the game within a second or two of full lock-on.

• That beam can only ever hit one enemy at a time, and the ramp-up resets the moment the connection breaks — if the target dies, wanders out of range, or the Inferno Tower itself gets stunned by something like Zap, Electro Spirit, Lightning, or an Electro Wizard's spawn pulse, the damage drops straight back down to its weakest opening stage.

• It costs 5 Elixir, fires from a 6-tile range, and takes only about a second to deploy, so it can be dropped reactively the instant a threat appears. Like every other building card, it can only target ground and air troops, never enemy buildings.

• Buildings in Clash Royale lose hitpoints passively every second just from being on the field, and Inferno Tower is no exception: at tournament standard it bleeds off roughly 58 hitpoints per second, which adds up to a full self-destruct after about 30 seconds even if the opponent never lands a hit on it.

• Inferno Tower has been around since Clash Royale's very first release: a limited iOS-only regional soft launch on January 4, 2016 covering a handful of countries including Canada, Australia, and the Nordics. The worldwide release followed almost two months later, on March 2, 2016.

• The card currently unlocks in the Spell Valley arena of the trophy road. It moved there in a 2022 arena reshuffle — before that, players had to progress much further, to P.E.K.K.A.'s Playhouse, to unlock it.

• Card levels now go as high as 15, but stats are traditionally quoted at tournament standard (level 11), the equalized level Clash Royale uses for tournaments and challenges so a level advantage can't decide the match — a maxed-out Inferno Tower on the ladder hits noticeably harder than the tournament-standard numbers above.

• It's widely considered the best single answer to a lone heavy tank — Golem, Giant, Royal Giant, Mega Knight, and P.E.K.K.A. all melt in a couple of seconds if left uncontested in front of it. Its single-target lock is also its biggest weakness: swarms like Skeleton Army or Minion Horde overwhelm it easily, and a support troop sent in behind a tank can split its attention. Placing it centrally so it also falls inside King's Tower range adds extra defensive firepower against incoming pushes.