Monk

Monk is a 5-Elixir Champion who fights like a brawler: a single, slower-hitting melee troop whose basic combo builds toward a big knockback punch every third hit. His signature trick is Pensive Protection, a cheap 1-Elixir ability that cuts incoming damage, shrugs off knockback, and bounces enemy ranged attacks back at their source for a few seconds — making him a headache for ranged, projectile-heavy decks to pin down. That protection only stops projectiles, though, so direct damage and swarms remain the reliable way to answer him. Monk's numbers have shifted more than once since his October 2022 release — most notably a cost increase to 5 Elixir and a cut to how much damage his ability blocks — and the newest balance pass changed how often he can use that ability at all, moving it from a rechargeable cooldown to a single use per deployment.

• Monk is a 5-Elixir Champion — a single, medium-speed melee troop that can only target ground units — unlocked in the Silent Sanctuary (Arena 18). He joined Clash Royale on 26 October 2022.

• At tournament-standard level 11, Monk has 2,214 hitpoints and punches for 140 damage every 0.8 seconds, which works out to 175 damage per second.

• Monk throws a 3-hit combo: the first two strikes are ordinary jabs, but the third lands as a haymaker dealing roughly triple the damage of a normal hit (about 422 damage at level 11) and knocks the target back — a shove strong enough to move even troops that are normally immune to knockback.

• His Pensive Protection ability costs 1 extra Elixir and, after roughly a 0.9-second windup, gives Monk 4 seconds of taking 65% less damage while shrugging off knockback and pull effects like Tornado — and any enemy ranged attack that connects during that window gets reflected straight back at whoever fired it, while spells instead get redirected at the nearest enemy tower.

• As of the August 2026 balance update, Pensive Protection can only be triggered once per deployment instead of on a recurring cooldown — Supercell stripped ability cooldowns from nearly every Champion and Hero (Boss Bandit was the lone exception), so Monk can no longer refresh and reuse his damage-reduction window every 17 seconds the way he could before.

• Monk launched at 4 Elixir; Supercell raised him to his current 5-Elixir cost in a December 2022 update after he proved to be the strongest Champion in the game at the time.

• Two months after that cost hike, an official February 2023 balance update sped up Monk's attacks by 0.1 seconds (about 11% faster), landing on the 0.8-second attack rhythm he still has today, to help offset the usage drop the cost increase had caused.

• A mid-2025 rebalance reined in Monk's staying power: Pensive Protection's damage reduction was cut from 80% down to today's 65%, alongside a small 3% hitpoints buff, after the ability was seen as being used more to stall for time than to actually deflect projectiles.

• Because Pensive Protection only reflects ranged, projectile-based attacks, direct damage sources like Inferno Tower, Inferno Dragon, Poison, and Lightning bypass it entirely, and cheap swarm troops such as Skeletons, Goblins, or Bats punish his slow, single-target attack rhythm — both are reliable ways to shut Monk down.