Minions

Minions are a 3-Elixir Common card that puts three fast, flying attackers on the battlefield at once. Because they fly, they cross the river and pass over ground troops freely, and they can strike both air and ground targets themselves. Their strength is speed and flexibility — they get their first hit in almost instantly and make a cheap, reliable answer to air threats like Balloon. Their weakness is fragility: three lightly-armored bodies bunched close together fold to almost any area-damage spell or splash troop, so they work best with support rather than sent in alone.

• Minions cost 3 Elixir and are a Common troop card that deploys three flying Minions at once, moving at Fast speed and able to hit both air and ground targets.

• At tournament standard (level 11), each Minion has 230 hitpoints and hits for 107 damage per strike, working out to 89 damage per second — so the trio together carries 690 combined hitpoints and can put out up to 321 damage in a single volley if all three connect.

• Minions currently strike from 2.5 tiles away on a 1.2-second cycle — and both numbers are the result of recent balance patches: an August 2025 update nearly doubled their range from 1.6 tiles because they struggled against splash-damage cards and most players didn't realize they attack with a projectile rather than a melee swing, then a February 2026 patch slowed their hit speed from 1.1 to 1.2 seconds because the longer range alone made them too dominant against other flying troops.

• Their first swing lands in just 0.5 seconds after they lock onto something — much quicker than the 1.2-second gap between hits afterward — so a freshly-deployed group of Minions punishes anything already in range almost immediately instead of needing a full wind-up.

• Flying lets Minions cross the river and pass over ground troops and buildings without slowing down, and it cuts both ways defensively — they can only be hurt by troops or spells that specifically reach into the air, so ground-only tools like The Log sail underneath them entirely.

• All three Minions are individually fragile and stand close together, so area-damage answers punish them hard: Arrows kill the whole group for an even 3-Elixir trade, and Fireball or Poison wipes them out while also splashing anything they were escorting.

• Minions are a go-to answer for air threats that lack their own anti-air, like Balloon or Lava Hound decks, and they're cheap enough to tack onto a Giant, Miner, or other push for extra chip damage without committing much Elixir.

• Minions go back to the very start of Clash Royale: they were in the game's limited regional soft-launch on 4 January 2016 (iOS only, in Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and six other countries), roughly two months before the worldwide release on 2 March 2016.