Miner

Miner is a 3-Elixir Legendary troop with a trick no other card quite matches: instead of walking onto the battlefield, he tunnels in and can surface almost anywhere, including on the opponent's side of the arena. Once he's up, he fights like a fairly ordinary single-target melee troop — solid hitpoints, moderate damage, ground-only — so his value comes almost entirely from where you put him rather than raw stats. Players use him two main ways: as a precision tool to snipe a lightly-armored ranged troop before it does more damage, or as a direct line to the enemy Crown Tower for chip damage that doesn't need a lane or a tank to open one up first. That second use is strong enough that Supercell has repeatedly dialed back how much damage he does to towers specifically — most recently in mid-2026 — while leaving the rest of the card alone.

• Miner is a Legendary troop that costs 3 Elixir and fields a single melee attacker on the ground. He's unlocked on the Trophy Road in Electro Valley (Arena 11), which opens up at 3,400 trophies.

• Miner's signature trait is that he can be deployed almost anywhere on the map, including deep in the opponent's own territory, by tunneling underground and surfacing exactly where he's placed — nudging aside any troops already standing there. He can't dive back underground once he's up. He also deploys in about 1 second, one of the fastest deploy times of any troop in the game.

• At tournament standard (level 11), Miner has 1,210 hitpoints and hits for 194 damage on a 1.3-second swing, which works out to about 149 damage per second. His first swing lands unusually fast, around 0.5 seconds after he surfaces, so he often gets the first hit in against troops that arrive at the same moment. He only targets ground units, so he can't fight back against anything flying.

• A July 2026 balance update cut how much damage Miner deals to Crown Towers, from about a quarter of his normal hit down to about a fifth. At tournament standard that's 39 tower damage per hit (roughly 30 per second) instead of the previous 49 (about 37 per second); his hitpoints, his damage against troops, and how he trades with other units were all left unchanged. Supercell's stated reasoning was that Miner was 'once again taking over Ranked play' on the strength of his guaranteed chip damage, so they trimmed his tower damage specifically rather than his combat stats.

• Because he can land anywhere, Miner is a common way to snipe squishy ranged troops — Princess, Dart Goblin, a lone Musketeer or Wizard — before they get another shot off, since dropping him directly on the target forces it to turn and fight instead of continuing to hit a tower. Placement matters: he typically needs to land on the target's inner tile to force that retarget, not just anywhere nearby.

• Miner's chip damage doesn't need a lane to be open, which is why he's long been the backbone of 'Miner Poison' style decks that pair him with the Poison spell to punish defenders. The archetype has stayed a recognizable part of the ladder for years rather than fading out with any single season's meta.

• Miner's placement freedom made him a target of 'this card is broken' complaints almost immediately — a July 2016 Reddit thread begging for a nerf helped spark a running community joke that outlived several genuine balance changes to the card and later went viral as a 'Nerf Miner' spam meme on TikTok in 2021-2022.

• Miner debuted on 3 May 2016 alongside two other new Legendary cards, Lava Hound and Sparky, in one of the largest single-update card drops of the game's first year.