36 current-season troops, ranked by a transparent, reproducible methodology built entirely from this site's own data — peak efficiency, effective output, trait synergy, star scaling, and ability — with the reasoning behind every placement published below, not hidden. This ranking is never changed by votes. Community opinion appears beside a troop once it passes 25 votes, shown as its own signal — 0 votes cast so far from 0 voters.
This ranks full-merge (4★) potential, not typical in-game performance at whatever star level a given match actually reaches — a stated scope choice, not an oversight.
This board is mid-transition for Season 11
The scored troop pool itself is changing, not just individual troops' values. Dark Prince, Hog Rider, and Ram Rider are new this season and have no performance data yet, so they carry no methodology score. Prince moved to the new Rider trait, which has no published stacking thresholds yet, so his Trait Synergy dimension is currently unscoreable. Up to 10 troops are also leaving the pool this season — Supercell hasn't named them, so every troop's normalized score could shift again once they're confirmed and removed. This board isn't being silently recomputed around these gaps; the placements below still reflect the pool as it stood before Season 11's roster changes.
Every troop below is placed by our published methodology — votes never move it. Cast your own verdict to add your voice to a troop's community signal, shown once it passes 25 votes.
First pick, every game, no questions asked.
Strong enough to build a comp around.
Solid. Fills a slot without carrying the run.
Situational — needs the right board to matter.
You've got 4 Elixir. Spend it on literally anything else.
Tier placement is always our published methodology score — votes are never folded into it. A troop's community vote count appears here once it passes 25 votes.
Each troop's editorial score is a weighted composite of five dimensions, computed entirely from data already published on this site:
15%
Peak Efficiency
15%
Effective Output
20%
Trait Synergy
20%
Star Scaling
30%
Ability
Peak efficiency uses the better of offense or defense, not their average
The first draft averaged offense-per-elixir and defense-per-elixir into one efficiency score. That penalizes specialists for not doing a job they were never built for — Giant, a pure tank with almost no offense, scored worse than its actual tanking value warranted purely because the average was dragged down by a stat it was never meant to have. Fixed by taking the stronger of the two instead of the mean.
Effective output — a troop can't be credited for damage it doesn't survive to deal
Switching to max() removed the only thing suppressing lopsided stat lines, and several cheap, fragile troops (Spear Goblins, Goblins, Dart Goblin) briefly rose on offense-per-elixir alone with nothing accounting for how quickly they die. Added a second, genuinely different dimension — offense × defense, both already-normalized — that collapses toward zero if either side is weak. A glass cannon with top offense and bottom defense no longer outranks a durable mid-statline troop; a pure tank still scores separately (and well) on peak efficiency for doing its one job, but doesn't get credited on this dimension for output it doesn't realistically land.
Trait value includes Ruler enablement, not just combat thresholds
Goblin trait has no combat thresholds at all — its five current troops were scoring zero trait value, even though Goblin Queen (one of 10 Rulers) explicitly ties into the trait in her own kit. Trait score is now combat-threshold magnitude plus Ruler enablement (checked against all 10 Rulers' real ability text — only Goblin Queen/Goblin and Tomb Queen/Undead have an explicit tie-in, so this is a small, real, data-derived credit, not an invented bonus).
This list ranks full-merge potential, not typical-star performance
The star-scaling dimension rewards a troop's ceiling at 4★, which is a different question from "how good is this troop in a typical match." That's a stated scope choice, not an error — it's a genuinely useful question nobody else in this space answers directly, and changing it wasn't justified on its own terms the way the two fixes above were.
Checked against mergetacticsbuild.com/en/tier-list (dated July 2026, claiming "community votes with real usage data from thousands of builds") — 8 of 30 comparable troops land in the same tier.
Our model measures stat/ability power potential from this dataset's own facts. Their list claims real usage data from actual matches — a data source Supercell doesn't expose and we can't reproduce, so we didn't try to approximate it. Two rounds of fixing real, independently-justified modeling errors (not tuning toward their answers) left the total divergence unchanged: 37 before, 37 after. If anything, fixing the Goblin-trait gap moved Goblin Machine further from their placement, not closer. That's the strongest evidence available that this list isn't fitted to theirs — and that the two are answering genuinely different questions about the same 30 troops.
Goblin Machine — ours D, theirs S
Widened, not narrowed, after the Ruler-enablement fix that was supposed to address exactly this gap — real evidence the divergence isn't a modeling bug on our side.
Skeleton King — ours S, theirs C
Our star-scaling dimension rewards 4★ ceiling; a usage-based list likely reflects typical, lower-star performance instead — a different question, not an error.
Knight — ours A, theirs D
Knight's raw efficiency is real, but a stat-only troop with no ability may get outclassed later in a real match in a way a static per-elixir score can't capture.
Giant — ours C, theirs S
A pure tank's battlefield role (absorbing damage for the rest of a comp) has real value a per-elixir offense/defense model doesn't fully credit.
Troops below have crossed 25 community votes with a clear majority leaning away from our published tier — real disagreement, not a handful of outlier votes. This is opinion data shown for its own sake; it does not change the tier above.
No troop has crossed 25 votes with a clear majority leaning away from our tier yet — check back as voting picks up.
The published tier for every troop is always our own methodology score — peak efficiency, effective output, trait synergy, star scaling and ability, with the reasoning shown for every placement — and votes never change it. Community votes appear beside a troop once it passes 25, shown as their own labelled signal (how many voters ranked it higher, the same, or lower than our tier), never as something that overrides the ranking.
Because a reproducible, transparent methodology is this list's actual value — nobody else in this space publishes their reasoning. Swapping a troop's placement for a raw vote count the moment enough people vote would trade that away for something weaker and less defensible: community sentiment can be brigaded and isn't reproducible. Votes are shown instead as a separate opinion signal, and where that signal diverges sharply from our tier, it's surfaced explicitly as its own section rather than silently overriding anything.
Full-merge potential. The star-scaling dimension specifically rewards how much a troop's stats grow from 1★ to 4★, so this ranks ceiling performance, not typical in-game power at whatever star level a given match actually reaches.
Checked against mergetacticsbuild.com/en/tier-list: 8 of 30 comparable troops land in the same tier. The rest is a real methodological difference, not an error on either side — their list claims real usage data from actual matches, which Supercell doesn't expose and this site has no way to reproduce, so this ranking measures stat and ability potential from this dataset's own facts instead.
Log in and link a player tag, then vote S through D on any troop. One vote per account per troop — re-voting changes your existing vote rather than adding a second one. Your vote adds to that troop's community signal; it never changes its published tier.
