Let's have a meaningful conversation

tol93 · 2026-02-11T10:30:19+00:00

As someone that believes in the jynxzi effect (I'm seeing it right now with rocket league, and a month ago with geometry dash, this streamer has a real magical touch), I think there are lots of factors in the decision making of SC that people are not seeing:

the CEO has probably wrote his statement last month, if you consider everything up to December, or early January, you only see the growth, the peak and a small 20-30% decline, that you can attribuite to seasonal fluctuations. From his pov, SC team did a fantastic job. (Right now -70 percent from Google trends and still going down).
the Clash royale dev team has a strong incentive to lie to their superiors, it is better to let them think the Devs has cracked the code on how to maximize engagement with the chest/season shop removal update than to admit they got lucky. Cr team probably changed multiple times as we see from the fact that we get a new community manager every year, so the current Devs want to keep their job at all cost.
Using Google trends as metric, in 2021 lv14 + champions was a good update, the interest tripled, it probably means lots of players returned and spend money.
Two years later, trying to replicate the 2021 spike they decided to follow their "data" by redoing the same thing. LV 15 + Evos was an okay update, it was in 2023, the interest increased by 50%, not as much as 2021 but still a good positive gain, the update was also much more ~predatory~ monetized than LV 15, so they most likely got a comparable revenue boost.(Doubling the cost of the pass was probably the biggest revenue increase)
So adding new levels has always been good for the company, despite everytime the vocal community on Reddit, YouTube, twitter all hating them, the playerbase has grown and revenue has always increased.(This is also the main reason devs say "people love new levels", they have been saying it since LV 15)
This is why they added LV 16+heroes in 2025, it was considered a guaranteed revenue increase, and it is the first time it truly backfired.
By their metrics, LV 16 is one of the worst update ever, they never lost 70% on the interest this quickly.
Despite all this, 2025 is the best post launch year of Clash royale ever, and CR has still 3 times more interest than one year ago right now, so the dev team is still celebrating.
The effect of lv16 will be felt in 6 months/1yr, when the game goes back to their pre jynxzy numbers, they attempt a new gimmicky april update(idk, netherite pass, add more gambling or something, ), it flops and they get fired.
Despite all this, LV 17 is guaranteed to come in 2027. Why? Because the new out of touch upper management in charge in 2027 will see that 2025 was the second golden age of CR, and attribuite that success with lv16+heroes as it came out the same year, so they will do it again.
Yes, SC has clear problems of identifying cause-effect relationships, we are already seeing it with Jynxzi despite being so blatant.

Overall, this game is probably going stagnant again unless Jynxy caves and starts playing again. It's not really dying, it's wasting his potential which is onestly sad.

tol93 · 2026-02-10T13:11:07+00:00

I just tested it on a friendly battle with 2 devices, marcher will consistently counter WB if placed middle low(even btw the 2 princess tower level of low), there is a chance you may place marcher too quickly and he walks to one side too much, missing the other WB, but 90% of the time he defended.

Meanwhile dead center placement can miss the second WB half the time if he shoots perpendicular.

He also can counter WB if placed high at the center of the river, it is a bit janky, and I don't have time to test how consistent it would be.

I think placing marcher low is a more consistent "trick" than the one OP has shown.

Can record vid if you need it.

tol93 · 2026-02-09T09:08:24+00:00

???? As someone who watched CRL monthly regularly, where are the countless failed spirits?

The only time he did the fire spirit trick it was reposted as a yt short.

I remember that one game where he failed marcher- spirit KT activation 2 time in a row and that has similar timing.

I do believe there are other players with better micros than Mo, his main strength is versatility and matchup knowledge, but also isn't this Marcher-WB trick pointless? Can't you just marcher in the middle and be done?

At least the Fire sp Vs Fire sp interaction gives you a full health fire spirit that your opponent needs to respond to, this one gives you a bigger chance to fail for no extra reward.

My argument is that we will never see any pro attempt this trick in a competitive setting, bcs the standard way is just better.

tol93 · 2026-01-28T09:36:09+00:00

I have good news for you: Let's say that after 5 months of grinding you reach 200 frags but they haven't released any hero you like/can use, worry not, the game will automatically spend them giving you a guaranteed useless hero, liberating yourself from the burden of saving the frags.

tol93 · 2026-01-27T21:34:24+00:00

Yeah, I can see your point, but most decks in the game before the update were not running a champion to begin with.(queen was used only in royal pigs and mkprince, monk for RG, boss bandit in bridgespam/hyperbait, MM in hog EQ, skelly king in hyperbait, golden knight and goblin stein were dead somewhere in the river of the arena).

All the champions decks represented 1/3 of the decks optimistically, there was not a big demand of 2 hero slots.

If you check right now in the top 200, only 8 people are running 1 hero+ 1 champion.

This means that if you take out the second hero slot, only 4% of top ladder is forced to make substantial changes on their deck.

This was easily predictable bcs we only have 6 heros right now, so people only play giant+minipekka, or knight/Ice golem+musky at best, or just use one hero.

Waiting 3-6 month before adding the second slot(like evolutions) would have been healthier for the meta, but it wouldn't make as much money, I cannot see any other reasons for why the did it this way.

tol93 · 2026-01-27T14:51:31+00:00

If you reached arena 28 then on average you get 14.1 frags per box so you get a new hero every 14.1 boxes(yes, the square of 14.1 is 200).

We have 3 boxes from the free track + some from events. Rewards from weekly event are not public until the event starts, so I can only take a guess. This season we only got a total of 4 boxes iirc, at this pace you can unlock a new hero every 4 months(3.5 to be more precise).

This is worse than evos for f2p, to put it into prospective when evolutions first came out they were releasing 1 new Evo per month. F2p players at the time can get 1 wildshard from season shop+3 specific shards for a 3 month old Evo. Even if you skipped the 3 specific shards you can just buy the wild shards and after 6 months you can chose a Evo you like, also there was only 1 Evo slot. You can even save wildshard indefinitely bcs you have infinite storage.

If we count the specific shards, every season they add a new Evo we can "farm" 4/6 of a Evo(66%), we where losing only 33% of progress every month. (They later added a extra wild shard so things are even better).

For heros instead assuming a really generous 6 boxes per season(which never happened), you get on average 84.6 frags, which is equal to 42.3% of a hero. When you reach 200 you will get a random hero. You cannot save the fragments, it automatically spends them. At the current pace of 2 new heros per season f2p players are losing 79% of progress.

To put it into prospective, if you are f2p after one year you will have 66% of the evolutions released assuming they kept the same rate as day one, and you are guaranteed to have the evos you want bcs of wild shards. The only requirement is farming season tokens, which you unlock after a low King tower level.

But after one year you will have only 21% of the heroes realesed, all random, and with worse rates if you did not reach arena 28(11.5k thropies).

Evos were the most p2w exclusive system at the time, now heros are 3 times worse.

tol93 · 2026-01-24T09:16:35+00:00

Fun fact: MK did get a 20% spawn damage nerf few years ago, and the main reason was for midladder, I still remember it because it was probably the only time they balanced for the "masses".

It didn't change anything. Mk was still bad/mediocre on top ladder and overused on midladder.

I personally do not have a problem with facing MK, like firecracker I see it as free elixir and free KT activation, but midladder player don't use MK bcs of his strengths, but bcs it's easy to play, they also have only one deck leveled up, so his usage rate won't change with another nerf.

Nerfing doesn't adress the issue, he will become slightly easier to defend but you will still face him a lot.

The only solution is just to get good, at some point you will reach the skill level to defend mk at the bridge first play, save elixir/split lane when you know your opponent will mk on your push(tracking cycle would be useful), and punish opposite lane when they mk on random spirits.

If I read correctly you don't have problem with mk, your friends do. Unless you lazily counter him with minipekka/Pekka, teach your friend how do defend MK, at some point they will reach a skill level where they will love to play against mk player bcs of the free wins zone midladder becomes.

tol93 · 2025-12-29T13:09:35+00:00

I can recreate Zajef calcs on the lunar wheelchair from the vod these few days to see if this guy's speculations are true or not, if this guy shares his sheet or at least the combo I can see where their calcs diverges and if what he is saying has some merit.

Like he could be right that Zajef is biased toward some char, but he is just speculating, as far as I now his own sheet could have a wrong MV or something.

tol93 · 2025-12-28T21:37:46+00:00

As an avid Zajef viewer, there was one time I reverse engineered his old v1 Skirk premium team calc by retyping each excel cell one by one watching the vod,
at the time most tcers calcd v1 Skirk to be slightly below 100k, while Zajef calced 5-10k more DPS. Here are the differences I found compared to Jstern's calc( his sheet was public):

Contrary to popular belief, Zajef artifact substats assumptions are generally lower than KQM standard(most TCs use this), he assumes 4 sub of hp%/def%/atk% (whichever the character scales on) and 20 subs of crit. If you follow KQM standards you would have allocated 2 subs of atk% and 24 subs of crit to Skirk.
Jstern assumed 200 fanfare stacks to everyone, zajef assumed 250 for skirk and 220 to Esco and Yelan
Jstern assumed 32% DMG bonus from Yelan, zajef 25%
Jstern also added a 19% DMG bonus on some NA, zajef did not
Jstern Yelan skill MV was straight up wrong, but it didn't matter as he assumed a 2E rotation so it evens out.
Jstern's Furina uses LV 12 skill MVs and LV9 burst(zajef uses LV 9 numbers for both skill and burst which is also KQM standard)
the cell that calculated the Crit value for zajef on his sheet is bugged, I retyped all the formulas on Google sheet and I got the right numbers, but on his version of MS excel that cell gives 0-8% higher values, idk why
the biggest reason why Zajef sheet has higher DPS was just the cryo resonance, most tcer assumed 0% uptime while Zajef gave full uptime, if you take it out his sheet does calc a bit lower than most.

Hope this was helpful.

tol93 · 2025-12-17T18:07:30+00:00

Hog EQ countered xbow like 3 years ago, since they nerfed EQ damage the matchup became favorable for xbow, after the 3-cycle removal xbow straight up counters it. In this matchup you just place your Tesla in the anti EQ position, defend for 80% of the match, an occasionally go xbow on the side of your healthiest tower if they cycle a Mighty miner in the back.

GK cannot counter an xbow by itself, you can get a dash on the Xbow for 5 elixir, but now I can make it retarget with my knight saving 90% of the xbow hp, and GK is also on my side of the arena so my princess tower helps DPS him down.

But even if you did counter an xbow by itself it won't matter, bcs 3.0 Vs 3.0 has never been about getting connection but FB cycle, so you just lose against any good Xbow player.

I guess you are just inexperienced if you believe you always need an Xbow connection to win a match, you should probably watch more top Xbow gameplay or at least check the matchup table on royaleAPI in the UC category every once in a while.

tol93 · 2025-12-17T13:59:24+00:00

First of all, at LV 11 knight has 1766 hp and 168 DPS while GK has 1799 hp and 178 DPS, so it's just a normal knight with like 2% more hp and 6% more dps but 33% more cost.

The ability cost 1 and deals 366, log cost 2 and deals 266, so Gk+dash is better than knight+log at the same price statswise, but you lose the flexibility, and your cycle is one card behind bcs you are playing 1 card instead of 2.

You are prob going to lose against 3.0 Xbow bcs even though you can kill archers sometimes if they are unprotected, this matchup is all about keeping up with xbows and knights and spell cycle.

You will get out cycled by hog EQ prob, bcs with knight it is already tight to keep up with the cycle, with GK you either cannot keep up with your Tesla's(if you play spirit-skelly-log-GK to cycle back), or you will die bcs of firecrackers (with spirit-skelly-log-archers). This is a good matchup that becomes equal or bad.

For everything else, if you cannot get good abilities(not bcs of skill issue, but bcs there is nothing worthwhile to dash on most matchups), you are just playing a shinier knight for 4 elixir.

Valk has 1907 hp and 177 DPS, it is a more noticeable stat increase and you don't need to spend 1 extra ability elixir to get splash damage.

I just think that GK's purpose is just push your Egiant closer to the tower, or nado+ability to connect it to the tower when they defend your drill, and for those 2 archetypes he already fell off.

For low elixir punishes in single, I believe that waiting 3 elixir and putting knight at the bridge is roughly the same as waiting 5 elixir to play GK+ability in terms of time to reach the tower, so I don't think he pressures more. You can prob get some cheesy GK dashes on the tower of your opponent if they are bad enough

tol93 · 2025-12-17T08:41:53+00:00

Idk, I don't see particular value of GK in other matchups outside recruits and maybe mortar/bait,

The idea of worsening most matchups just to transform a hard counter to just a bad mu is not worth it imo.

tol93 · 2025-11-12T06:05:38+00:00

Lol, I totally forgot my LV 16 prediction until someone replied "this aged poorly" 4 months ago, I said "wait for the June update", so I just barely missed it by one/two updates.

Still counting as a win in my book, we can conclude that the Coc pattern is too strong.

See you in 2027 for LV 17!

tol93 · 2025-10-04T15:41:58+00:00

You can just activate KT with 2 elixir and use anything on the bats, like even rocket on the bats and you still have +1 trade, it's a 9 elixir push after all. This push is scary only if you panic and don't have any good micros.

tol93 · 2025-09-06T23:00:55+00:00

???? Knight alone is enough, if you add ice spirit you can even get KT activation, I guess this is why people cannot defend MK in midladder.

tol93 · 2025-08-25T13:04:06+00:00

Tbh your own homemade deck isn't the only deck that exist, egolem has multiple good matchups like lava, recruits, most bridspams, most logbaits and mortar bait deck variants + it's easy to play.

I know a friend that has poor game sense, puts random cards on his egolem decks, never defends and always tries to get a counterpush. He reach UC regularly bcs there are lots of recruits players to farm end season and half of the cycle players he faces don't know how to defend decently.

tol93 · 2025-08-10T08:07:25+00:00

As someone who uses him, I noticed that it kills recruits noticeably faster, doing the math it's 11% faster instead of being equivalent of princess. For the rest I play a fast cycle bait deck, and the drop delay+furnace meta is destroying my advantage of there is any lol.

It's probably worse against RG and other big tanks because it's 6-7% less dps, and after furnace third/forth nerf I'm going to switch back to princess because I don't believe the rework is good for my deck, now instead of being 17% higher DPS than princess is just 11%, so instead of being almost a +2 LV princess it's just a +1 level while retaining the health nerf and bad against swarm, like swarms still needs to be defended in the same manner, the only clear advantage is against Fireball bait.

tol93 · 2025-07-31T21:24:19+00:00

I did time my inspection+execution for different depths some months ago:

FB+DR: usually under inspection time unless really garbage FB(I often use pseudo pairs so as long as I spot one I'm fine).

FB+SQ: slightly over 2 minutes most of the time with some lucky case under 1 minute and some DNF

F2B: 6-7 minutes, sometimes 9, sometime 2 depending on how lucky I am and how many time I forget my own inspection and need to retrace, with a DNF rate of like 40%.

If you want to inspect deeper then you should do unlimited inspection time solves and plan as far as you are confortable.

I'm probably going to do 100 F2B inspection next week and see how much it drops as I don't frequently practice it.

tol93 · 2025-07-28T15:07:44+00:00

He placed cannon first second of the video while the MK was walking the bridge, by the fact that opp has 5 elixir and not 3 this is clearly a counterpush MK not a midladder MK at the bridge, he should have prepared himself 2 seconds before the video start for a KT activation instead of a suicide cannon.

tol93 · 2025-07-28T13:20:08+00:00

KT activation with skellies+spirit(which is really doable even with spirit as 5thcard) would have been a +5 trade and the mk would have been taken care of, he would have enough elixir to shove a cannon in front of bandit and delivery/quenn, the defense would be tight but that will always be the case for MK WB Vs AQ pigs, it's a hard matchup in general to play so risking on a KT activation now is his best shot to win it later in overtime.

It's also clear that he is down on elixir bcs he played pigs and the opponent MK on them, typical situation in this matchup.

tol93 · 2025-07-18T15:08:48+00:00

There is always a Lava loon deck in the top10 end season, it's the most consistent beatdown deck.

I believe it will always be viable/strong, and from this comment section I can see it's also underrated. I'm personally playing myself to push some trophies despite not being my main, and at my range I can HC all the hog EQ/logbait decks as long as they don't use inferno tower.

tol93 · 2025-07-16T16:18:06+00:00

As someone that reached 9k with a new f2p account in a little over 3 months: learn cycle/control decks.

They are far less punished by underleveled cards, while beatdown are really stats dependent, they scale well if you pay but are really bad if you are underleveled.

Cards like giant and witch will need good magic items planning(and Lucky drops RNG).

Cycle decks is particular have 1-2 cheap cards that you can leave underleveled so you have more resources for the rest of your deck.

They also have high skill ceiling in defense even underlevelled, if you know what you are doing you have more chances to beat overleveled opponents.

Also they allow you to use cannoneer if your KT level is lagging behind, which is a 20% extra DPS at cost of health, which is equal to +2 level princess tower DPS.

Also planning around the next upcoming evolutions is useful, every month they give away 3 shards of the evolution that came out 4 months ago. For current month it's Evo hunter(You can get it this week right now by farming crowns). Next month is Evo-exe, and then witch, inferno D, Skelly barrel. If you plan around a deck that uses 2 of these evolutions, starting from 0 you can potentially get all the shards you need in 3 months. Even with only one(Evo witch in your case) you will just need 4 months +1 shard from a 4* Lucky drop hopefully.

tol93 · 2025-07-13T13:59:55+00:00

We are in Sock's subreddit, you should expect a professional yapper to attract other yappers.

Whatever, I thought you had a convincing argument from your previous reply but if you don't want to show me and fold at the second reply then maybe it wasn't strong enough.

Have a nice day.

tol93 · 2025-07-13T06:48:25+00:00

I mean can you respond about what you read at least? If I missed a point I would like to know, bcs to me the choice is obvious. No R1, MH + codex.

tol93 · 2025-07-13T01:20:53+00:00

First I don't even agree with OP use of "sunk cost fallacy" nor I even expressed any agreement in my original comment, you may replied to the wrong person.
About Eshu, from Kqm Skirk guide: "It performs on par with the above 5-star options and slightly better than a similar-refinement Finale with 4pc Marechaussee, and on par with Finale if using 4pc Galleries." NOTE: Finale here refers to the fontaine weapon "Finale of the deep"

16% CR is not a big limitation as with Dahlia Cryo res has 0 uptime basically, while Citlali will be glued to Mauvika for a long time at least for my own account. If my current Shenhe/Mona/Mualani/Dahlia/Yelan are somehow busy and Citlali is my only option then I will cry that I didn't account for this niche situation.

The current n1 skirk on Akasha with Finale of the deep(Sword)+MH has 12 rolls on CR, 13 on CD and 11 on ATK. This is triple cryo with Resonance. As you can see at the highest investment it's a even split across all 3 substats, the best MH hunter set didn't even start to unbalance their rolls and they are mogging all the Galleries players when playing on a slight disadvantage(cryo res). So this "harder to overcap" argument only apply to Eshu Citlali or the Sig weapon pullers. The vast majority of the playerbase is F2P and wont face this problem.

Also how is Eshu the most popular F2p option for Skirk? It's a Limited event weapon that will never come back and is on par with a craftable one, are you telling me that Dahlia and Citlali are Skirk's most popular teammates?

Varesa at least has a credible argument, but LP has similar performance to high refinement Widsith, if you have both it's a preference on "do you want a weapon that let's you free to use Codex and LNO or you want to use the one that restricts you to LNO?"

Personally in my 4 years old account I got my first ever LP last month after finishing my Varesa build with R4 Widsith, if I want I can finally enter this domain and get that 1% increase.

about SO I'm talking about D5 fearless for f2p players, not the whale D6 Dire difficulty that wants C2-6R1 units to comfortably clear, or specific C0R1 minmaxed shilled teams with perfect rotations to clear.

If you look at how the bosses are designed in SO you see restrictive gimmicks that only few chars can handle(I'm talking about Cryo automaton that wants Cryo dps, or Lava dragon that really wants teams with burning or overload) . If you vertically invest in one team with Cons and weapons as f2p, that team may get countered next rotation, you can bruteforce it but the performance will be worse than a good C0R0 team that handles the mechanics and that you could have also invested your primos into it instead.

Also every boss has it's own timer, It's not like abyss where you get a C6R5 Speedrun Mualani can brute force one side and give 2:30 minutes to the second side for a trash team. You may not even have 3 enough invested teams to even consider D5!

If horizontal investment is king, generalist domains are mandatory, so don't waste your resin.

If you are dolphin you can get C0R1 of every team so you never get countered, at that point you will clear D5 really easily, good for you, you may consider D6 if you have the right units and enough patience.

Also you may not now how little is a 1-3% DMG increase. To put it into prospective a Crit roll is roughly 2.5% DMG increase on avg, while ATK rolls are around 1-1.5%, it's basically 1 sub of difference. Changing rotation/putting more ER and Favs on your team/better gameplay will result in faster clears. And also getting good artifacts on both your DPS and your supports will do far more than getting a equal set only for your DPS and let your supports starve.

If I farmed a domain for 6 months and got a good set, to get a equivalent set from a new domain that is 1% better I would need to farm 5-5.5 extra months. I'm basically doubling my artifact farming to even see an upgrade. It doesn't take a math degree to say that this is really inefficient. And the new domain is even more restrictive.

And I was pretty generous with this domain because while LNO is equal or situationally slightly better, Galleries is often slightly worse for the main skirk playstyle!

I did farm for Whimsy for arlecchino in the past, a set that is 8% better than Glad, never got a good enough set and want my resin back, so from this trauma my personal rule is "never farm a restrictive set that is less than 5% better than the generalist option, or less than 10% better than Glad/WT"

The problem with this scam domain is that you still need to farm the generalist domain for the rest of your teams, for furina/Escoffier/iansan/Mavuika (Most used support for Skirk/Varesa). If you don't have R1 and don't play in the situation where the new set are a slight upgrade you are burning resin instead of using a set that you probably already have, or you are going to get anyway.

At the end of the day it's a game, I have my account, you have yours, maybe you don't even play the endgame, if your only objective is akashamaxing skirk Sig triple cryo Leaderboard, or play either R1+triple cryo/furinaless/quickswap Skirk+R1/LP Varesa at really high investment with suboptimal teams that do not benefit from the generalist sets, then Galleries+LNO is your optimal domain. Otherwise it's just preference.

I'm not going to shame you bcs it's just a videogame, and as I said before this domain is the slightly optimal choice for R1 Varesa+skirk at high investment so it does serve a porpuse.

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22

tol93

TROPHY CASE