Phoenix

Phoenix is a 4-elixir Legendary flying troop that attacks one target at a time at melee range and can strike both air and ground. Everything about it is built around a second life: when the bird dies it detonates for area death damage that knocks nearby units back, then leaves an egg where it fell. Let that egg sit undisturbed for 3.8 seconds and it hatches a brand-new Phoenix carrying the original's full hitpoints and damage; break the egg inside that window and the push is over. The rebirth is strictly a one-time deal, because the reborn bird neither explodes nor leaves an egg of its own. Its balance history is a rough launch followed by a long campaign to make the rebirth matter. Three nerfs landed inside its first six weeks in late 2022, but the last few years have gone the other way: August 2025 removed the heavy penalty its death explosion took against Crown Towers, November 2025 restored the reborn bird to a full-strength copy of the original instead of an 80% version, and March 2026 pushed the egg from 240 to 317 hitpoints — enough to survive a lone Log — while trimming the hatch timer from 4.3 seconds to 3.8.

• Phoenix is a 4-elixir Legendary flying troop that attacks a single target at melee range and can hit both air and ground units. At tournament standard (level 11) it carries 1,052 hitpoints and 217 damage per swing on a one-second hit speed — a flat 217 damage per second — climbing to 1,694 hitpoints and 349 damage at the level 16 cap. It unlocks in Spooky Town, Arena 12.

• When Phoenix is killed it explodes for area death damage in a 1.5-tile radius and knocks surrounding units back, leaving an egg on the spot. If that egg survives 3.8 seconds it hatches a new Phoenix with the original's full hitpoints and damage. The rebirth only fires once — the reborn bird deals no death damage and leaves no egg of its own — which makes Phoenix the only card in the game that brings itself back.

• Phoenix opens quickly for a melee unit: its first swing lands 0.5 seconds after it locks on, twice as fast as the one-second cadence it settles into afterwards. With a one-second deploy time on top, that makes it unusually snappy when dropped straight on top of an attacking ranged troop.

• Until August 2025 the death explosion barely registered against towers — it was cut by 70%, so a level 11 Phoenix landed only about 49 of its 163 death damage on a Crown Tower. Supercell removed that penalty outright, dropping the reduction to zero, and the blast now hits towers at full value.

• A November 2025 balance update stopped short-changing the second bird. A reborn Phoenix used to return at 80% of the original's stats; it now comes back at 100% — a 25% jump that took its level 11 hitpoints from 842 to 1,052 and its damage from 174 to 217 — and it is full-sized again rather than visibly smaller than the first Phoenix.

• March 2026 rebuilt the egg. Its hitpoints rose 32%, from 240 to 317 at tournament standard, while the hatch window tightened from 4.3 seconds to 3.8 — a much tougher egg that has to survive a shorter wait. Supercell framed it as doubling down on the rebirth mechanic after Phoenix repeatedly failed to find a place in the meta.

• That buff broke the cheapest answer to the rebirth. The Log deals 266 damage at level 11, comfortably enough against the old 240-hitpoint egg, but it now falls short of 317 — so a single Log no longer stops a Phoenix coming back. Supercell's own patch notes put it as "The Log will no longer be enough to make an omelet."

• The egg does not count as a building, so building-targeting troops ignore it and building-specific spell damage doesn't apply. It also used to be immovable — Tornado slid straight past it — but a bug fix changed that, and Tornado now drags the egg around like any other unit, giving defenders a way to pull it somewhere lethal.

• Phoenix had a brutal debut. It launched on 26 October 2022 and was cut down three times in six weeks: a 2 November maintenance break took 10% off its damage, a 21 November break stripped 34% from the egg's hitpoints, and a 7 December balance update removed another 13% of the bird's own hitpoints. Two more trims followed in 2023 — 10% off death damage that April, and a slower one-second attack cadence, up from 0.9 seconds, that June.