How to Make a Good Clash Royale Deck in 2025

Mahdi

Introduction

Deck-building in Clash Royale has never been more difficult. In 2025, there are over 679 billion possible deck combinations without even accounting for card evolutions and tower troops, and over 12.7 trillion with them, making manually crafting the best deck nearly impossible. At the highest level, deck-building isn't just about picking strong cards—it's a deeply strategic process that requires understanding trends, maximizing positive interactions, and adapting to an ever-changing meta.

The importance of proper deck-building is so high that professional players pay tens of thousands of dollars for coaches to construct decks for them in tournaments. My goal with this guide is to educate you through both the traditional approach to deck-building and the advanced methodology used by high-level players and us, showing why deck optimization is one of the most critical aspects of competitive play.

TL;DR of Contents

If you want to improve your deck-building skills or understand why high-level deck-building is so important, here's a quick breakdown of what this guide covers:

The Outdated Approach to Deck-Building – The common, simple steps most players use and why they fall short at higher levels
The Cost of High-Level Deck-Building – Why pro players pay thousands for deck-building services and why deck optimization is essential
The Deck AI Methodology – A step-by-step breakdown of how to build the best decks using a data-driven approach, including:

Step 1: Establish your deck parameters
Step 2: Identify the most common matchups in your playlist
Step 3: Weigh matchups by popularity
Step 4: Optimize for your own card levels
Step 5: Adapt your deck as you rank up
Step 6: Account for balance changes

Conclusion – How the sheer required intricacy of the process makes manually putting together an optimized deck extremely difficult and the paths you can take from here

The Outdated Approach to Deck-Building

Most players approach deck-building using a pretty standard method:

Choose a Win Condition (or two) – Your main way of dealing damage (Hog Rider, Miner, Royal Giant, etc.).
Support Your Win Condition – Cards that help your win condition reach the tower, like splash damage dealers, mini tanks, or control units.
Add Some Defensive Cards (Air and Ground Units) – Defensive troops and buildings that stop enemy pushes efficiently.
Balance Elixir Costs and Synergy – Making sure your deck isn't too heavy and works well together.

This approach provides a solid foundation, but it falls short in higher-level play. While these steps create a functional deck, they don't account for deeper strategic layers like adapting to opponent trends, predicting shifts in the meta, or weighing matchups properly. Decks using this, or any similar rigid blueprint, can still be pretty bad a lot of times. This is why professional Clash Royale coaches don't really think about these casual steps when creating decks for top players.

The Cost of High-Level Deck-Building

High-level deck-building isn't just an extra advantage—it determines whether you climb or stagnate. This is why pro players literally pay thousands of dollars to have expert coaches craft their decks for them. All the best players in the world allocate a percentage of their tournament winnings to deck-building coaches charging tens of thousands of dollars to craft the best possible decks for major competitions.

Why? Because at the highest level, deck-building isn't just a skill—it's a science. It involves tracking opponents' decks, balance changes, and playing out card interactions down to individual card placement and cycle sequences. Pro players know they can't do all of this manually while focusing on gameplay, so they outsource it to experts.

The Deck AI Methodology

This next section covers some of the data-driven strategies that separate average players from top-tier competitors.

Step 1: Establish Your Deck Parameters

Cards You Enjoy vs. Cards You Dislike
- Everyone has cards they like and don't like using.
Speed (Fast/Medium/Slow)

Some people like playing faster cycle decks, some like heavier decks, and others don't care. Each has its advantages.

Archetype (Siege/Control/Beatdown)
- Siege: Long-range tower pressure, focusing on protecting a key structure (e.g., Mortar, X-Bow)
- Control: Chips away aggressively (e.g., Hog Rider, Miner), thrives on frequent attacks, but can lack defensive depth
- Beatdown: Large tank-based pushes (e.g., Giant, Lava Hound), often trading tower HP for a massive counterpush
Attack or Defense Bias
- Offense-Oriented: Rapid, high-pressure decks that are more focused on overwhelming the enemy
- Defense-Oriented: Slower, more secure setups that aim to negate enemy damage as much as possible
Resource Approach (Free-to-Play vs. Higher Investment)
- F2P: Look for decks with dependable commons and rares that remain effective without maxed-out epics, legendaries, and champions.
- Higher Investment: If you can level specific cards quickly, consider more synergy-heavy or specialized decks—like high-level beatdown or siege builds.
Style (Narrow or Broad Focus)
- Narrow: Focus on one dominant mechanic (e.g., log bait) to exploit weak matchups.
- Broad: Cover various threats for more balanced matchups. Decks like these will make how you win more diverse depending on your opponent's deck.

Step 2: Identify the Most Common Matchups at Your Rank

Imagine you're trying to beat a friend who always runs Hog 2.6. You wouldn't build just any deck; you'd construct one specifically designed to counter Hog 2.6. That means including strong defensive options like tornado or a building to shut down the hog.

But what if you know your friend sometimes plays a wall breaker log bait deck too? Now, your hog counter deck struggles, because it wasn't built with log bait in mind.

A great deck doesn't just counter one threat—it maximizes favorable matchups against as many threats as possible.

To do this you'll need to:

Record your previous matches and track which decks you faced the most.
Categorize decks into archetypes and look for commonalities (e.g., beatdown, cycle, control).
List cards that appear in multiple decks and determine which counters are viable against multiple threats.
Test small adjustments by swapping one card at a time and monitoring whether your matchups improve against each deck using our matchup calculator.

This principle extends to ladder and ranked play. You need to build your deck based on the specific decks you'll be facing at your rank, not just general concepts of what's good. Your opponents at different ranks will play different types of decks with different card levels, so a deck designed to play at 6,000 trophies won't look the same as one designed for 7,500 trophies.

Step 3: Weighing Matchups by Popularity

Not all decks are equally common. The cards and decks you're more likely to see are going to be more important to counter than their less common counterparts. If the most common deck at your rank appears four times more often than even the 25th most common deck, then making sure you have a favorable matchup against that top deck is a priority.

To apply this effectively:

Rank your matchups based on frequency—use a simple tally system or a spreadsheet.
Take a weighted average of the win rates of matchups against those decks accordingly.

Step 4: Considering Card Levels

A deck can look perfect in theory but fall apart in practice if your key cards are underleveled. Many players make the mistake of copying popular decks without considering if their own card levels are strong enough to make them work. The best deck for you isn't just the best deck overall—it's the best deck based on what you actually have upgraded. On the other hand, figuring out what your opponents may have over- or underleveled is important so you can determine the interactions between your card levels.

You'll need to:

Find the card-level distributions of your opponents at your rank for each card.
Compare your own levels of your cards to figure out probable interactions so you can keep cards that will achieve favorable elixir trades.

Step 5: Adapting as You Rank Up

Even if you build a perfect deck for 7,500 trophies, it might not work at 8,000. As you climb, the decks you face will change, and what worked at one rank may be less effective at another. Deck-building is an ongoing process, and the best players constantly adapt based on the opponents they're seeing. This means you should be continually removing old data from your spreadsheet and adding new data.

Step 6: Accounting for Meta Shifts

The game is always evolving. New cards get added, balance changes shake up the meta, and boosted cards will change too. A deck that was strong last season might be weak now, and the set of viable decks drastically depends on these factors. When the season ends, you'll need to reevaluate the matchups you calculated that contain cards that have been altered.

Conclusion

When you consider how many deck combinations you need to account for, the complexity of deck-building becomes obvious. Manually optimizing a deck from all those possibilities—while factoring in specific matchups, card levels, meta shifts, and deck cycling efficiency—is basically impossible.

This is exactly why the best players in the world invest so heavily in deck-building services. They know that to focus on playing at the highest level, they have to rely on a system—or a coach—that can handle the behind-the-scenes data analysis. They also have the benefit of not having to worry about card levels and having a limited number of opponents to think about. For other players, it's an even harder problem to solve.

But here's the good news:

Deck AI takes these exhaustive tasks—matchup analysis, meta tracking, level comparisons—and automates them, so you can still experiment and enjoy the creative freedom of choosing which cards to play. Our technology helps you compare different decks or build new ones while taking into consideration everything you could possibly care about.
You maintain flexibility and fun in deck construction, but you're never left guessing whether a certain card swap will ruin a key matchup you're forgetting about.
And as you climb or face balance changes, Deck AI seamlessly updates with you.