Mortar

Mortar is a 4-elixir Common building that lobs slow, arcing shells at any ground target within a wide ring around itself, dealing area damage on impact from as far as 11.5 tiles away. Its signature quirk is a blind spot — nothing closer than about 3.5 tiles can be hit, so troops that rush straight up to it slip through untouched. It's also temporary: a placed Mortar disappears roughly 30 seconds after deployment rather than sitting on the field indefinitely the way a Cannon or Tesla does. Its Evolution, available since mid-2023, adds a live Goblin to every shell impact for some extra board presence on top of the splash damage, though the base card has to be played twice before the evolved shot recharges. Recent balance updates have pulled the two versions closer together: an August 2026 patch sped up the ordinary Mortar and slowed the Evolution down until their attack speeds matched, and an earlier 2026 patch made the Evolution's tossed Goblins slower to spring into action after landing.

• Mortar is a 4-elixir Common building that fires high-arcing shells dealing area damage to any ground target within a long 3.5-to-11.5 tile range, letting it snipe targets from deep inside your own territory.

• That same range hides a weakness: the shell can't be aimed at anything closer than 3.5 tiles away, so a fast attacker that reaches the Mortar — a Hog Rider, Goblins, or a Miner popping up beside it — goes completely untouched.

• Unlike Cannon, Tesla, or Inferno Tower, a Mortar isn't permanent: it vanishes about 30 seconds after being deployed, so every placement is really paying for a short window of siege fire rather than a lasting structure.

• An August 2026 balance update — part of a push to stop base-form cards being overshadowed by their Evolutions — sped Mortar up from a 5-second hit speed to 4.7 seconds (about 6% faster). Combined with its 266 area damage per shell at tournament standard (level 11), that works out to about 56.6 damage per second, up from roughly 53 before the patch.

• Mortar dates back to Clash Royale's earliest days: it was part of the limited regional soft-launch on 4 January 2016 (iOS only, in a handful of countries) that preceded the game's worldwide release on 2 March 2016, and it's still one of the first building cards new players unlock, arriving in the Builder's Workshop arena.

• EvolutionSince its 3 July 2023 release, Evolved Mortar tosses a live Goblin onto the impact point of every shell in addition to the normal splash damage, adding some ground presence to what's otherwise a pure siege card — though the base Mortar has to be played twice to fully recharge the next evolved shot.

• EvolutionAn August 2026 update slowed Evolved Mortar's attack rate from once every 4 seconds to once every 4.7 seconds (about 18% slower), matching it to the newly-buffed base Mortar and erasing the speed advantage that used to make the Evolution strictly faster-firing than the vanilla card.

• EvolutionA June 2026 patch increased the tossed Goblin's deploy time from 0.2 to 0.5 seconds, giving defenders more time to react before the Goblin can start attacking — aimed at toning down how oppressive a well-timed Evolved Mortar goblin lock used to be.