Elite Levels - 2023 Q2 Summer Update

The maximum card level in Clash Royale after the Summer 2023 Q2 update will be Level 15, known as the Elite Level. Reaching this level will require a different approach than other cards. Here’s some info and tips to help upgrade your cards.

Table of Contents

• Elite Levels: Level Up your strategy
• Elite Wild Cards: Conversion Costs
• Magic Items
• Upgrade Cost Equivalence
• Elite Grinding: 2 upgrades per season
• Elite Shopper
• Elite Gem Spending
• Bonus Fact
• Elite Feedback

Elite Levels: Level Up your strategy

Upgrading your Clash Royale card collection to Level 15 isn’t going to be quick or easy. Despite not needing gold, you’ll need to become a fairly active player if you want to upgrade cards as soon as possible. We’ll get into more detail in this blog, but a ballpark number to keep in mind is that you can upgrade around 2 cards per season.

This means that you’ll need several months to upgrade your full deck, and even more for your 4 Clan Wars decks. A few days ago we announced that Path of Legends would remain capped at Level 14 for 6 months; this delay now makes a lot of sense, if you collect resources properly you should have at least 1 maxed deck by then.

Elite Wild Cards: Conversion Costs

To upgrade cards to Level 15, you don’t need cards or gold, just Elite Wild Cards (EWCs). All cards need the same amount to be upgraded, regardless of the rarity: 50,000 EWCs each.

Is this a lot? Let’s break down how EWCs are earned so that this amount becomes more intuitive to understand. You’ll earn them when cards of your collection overflow, meaning that you have more than you need for Level 14. Based on the rarity, overflow cards are converted to EWCs as follows:

The main takeaway from this table should be that common cards are the best to obtain Elite Wild Cards efficiently, and legendary cards are the worst. This is very useful to know. When buying cards in the Daily Shop or Seasonal Shop, common cards will give you 40x more EWCs than legendaries for the same amount of gold.

Magic Items

The other way to earn EWCs is with Magic Items, which can be converted into EWCs once all your cards of a certain rarity are upgraded to level 14. The items that can be converted are:

This means that Wild Cards and usual cards give the same amount of EWCs, so you can spend them as usual without losing value. The value for Magic Books is the same for all rarities, which is quite bad in all cases compared to potential card value. Converting them into EWCs is hardly better than the overflow value of 100 gems, but there’s not much else to be done if your collection is maxed.

Another thing to keep in mind is that without overflow conversion into gold, you can collect more cards than you’ll ever need to level up. As long as a card is below level 14, you can collect up to 50K extra copies. For example, you could potentially have 50,020/20 Miners. Once you finally level up that card to 14, the remaining cards are automatically converted into EWC.

Upgrade Cost Equivalence

So yes, earning 50,000 EWCs for each of your cards is going to take time. These are the equivalent amounts of cards that you’d need to obtain the 50K:

These values are proportional to the value ratios that we mentioned earlier: earning EWCs through common cards is 40x better than doing it with legendaries.

The common card value places upgrade prices at around 125K gold, which is similar to what Level 14 had. The picture isn’t as pretty when looking at the value of other rarities, but fortunately common cards are very common.

Elite Grinding: 2 upgrades per season

In our recent Where is the Gold blog, we looked at how much gold you can earn per season. We can run a similar analysis with EWCs:

In summary, with fully free rewards you can earn around 50K tokens per season, which is enough to upgrade 1 card. To take this a step further, consider:

• Daily Shop will almost double this base amount, common and rare cards will provide great value. (+70% boost)
• Season Shop has several cheap offers that have great Elite Value. Magic Book, common cards and rare cards are the Top 3 items available. (+10% boost)
• If you can still request cards, ask your clanmates for commons.
• It’s still unclear how Trade Tokens will affect EWCs, but they could become useful. Global Tournaments are a great way to earn them.
• Premium rewards from Global Tournaments provide great value if you can get 10 wins. (+30% boost)
• Buying Pass Royale will be a noticeable boost for your progression, but don’t expect it to perform miracles. (Gold: +20% boost, Diamond: +30% boost)

Note: these calculations assume that all the cards you earn overflow into EWCs.

By looking at these results, it seems clear that Elite Cards will greatly reward players who are active daily. Buying offers and Pass Royale will boost your progression, but they provide a fraction of what’s available for everyone else.

Elite Shopper

If you are currently level 14 and looking to boost your progression as soon as the update is released, you might want to hold on to your Season Tokens for now. We have looked at the value that shop items provide and ranked them from best to worst. Results are quite different to the ones we were used to, which prioritised gold value. See for yourself:

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The Magic Book jumps to the top. Commons, Rares and Epics become very appealing options.

Legendary Wild Cards, which were one of the best options when looking for gold will now have one of the worst values.

If we take a look at the Daily Shop we’ll see a similar theme:

Legendary cards in the shop used to be useful to obtain Star Points quickly, and they’ll still be useful for that purpose. But anyone looking for EWCs should see them as a fairly bad option to spend gold.

It’s still unclear how the gold economy will look after the update, as a lot of gold rewards are being increased, but gold from card overflow is being removed. Napkin math points to these two compensating each other, meaning that maxed players will still receive more gold than they can spend in the Daily Shop. If that’s eventually the case, buying these legendaries should still be a reasonable use for excess gold.

Elite Gem Spending

All these changes to the Clash Royale economy have an impact on the best ways to spend gems. Until now, gold value was optimal for Grand Challenge rewards only if you were able to reach 11 or 12 wins. For most players this wasn’t a reliable goal, so that’s why Global Tournament premium rewards are known as the most efficient way to spend gems.

With the new EWC conversion values, Challenge rewards will be much better to boost progression. These chests contain a lot of common and rare cards, so that's why their relative value is improving significantly.

Achieving 12 wins in a Grand Challenge will now give you 2.5 times more efficiency than Global Tournaments. Maybe more importantly, as long as you can reach 9 or more wins, it’s worth it to spend gems in GCs over Global Tournaments.

Here’s a quick summary of how these value propositions have changed:

• 1
  • Before: 11+ GC wins are the most efficient
  • New: 9+ GC wins are the most efficient
• 2
  • Before: 12 GC wins are 38% better than Global Tournaments
  • New: 12 GC wins are 143% better than Global Tournaments
• 3
  • Before: 10 GT wins ~ 10 GC wins
  • New: 10 GT wins ~ 8 GC wins

As a conclusion, for advanced players who can reliably get 8 wins in challenges, this becomes their best option. Global Tournaments will remain the best option for casual players who can’t get consistent amounts of wins: you can play first, and if you are lucky, unlock the rewards. You’ll still need to reach 10 Global Tournament wins to unlock the Legendary King’s chest, the main contributor to the value of GT rewards.

Other ways to spend gems such as boosting your chest cycle or buying chests from the show are still much worse than GCs and GTs.

Bonus Fact

You can have up to 400K Elite Wild Cards, but don’t collect them, spend them to upgrade your cards!

Elite Feedback

We tried to provide all the basic information and enough details to help you optimise progression. If there’s anything else that you’d like to know, ask us in the comments’ section below.

This seems to be the start of a new era for the Clash Royale economy, so surely there will be advanced strategies to take full advantage of new features. If you come up with any, share them below as well!

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