Clash of Clans: How To Spend Your League Medals; An Economic Guide
TL;DR: Save up for hammers of hero, fighting, and spell at TH13 or even wait for TH14 to be released. Exceptions may apply based on personal priorities. Skip to the end for details.
There are a few different priorities that are common in this game, and which set you use and how active a player you are will determine how you personally should spend your league medals.
In this guide, I will examine what the different magical items are useful for achieving, and calculating specifically how useful they are toward achieving it, and giving them an actual value that can be compared easily with the values of the other magic items.
Flat gold: 100k per medal. Waste of medals; you can easily grind out this much gold with Archer Queen and goblins in a very short time. These flat bonuses are only good if you hate to grind and don’t mind to waiting longer for everything in the game.
Flat elixir: 100k per medal. Waste of medals; you can easily grind out this much gold with archers and goblins in a very short time. These flat bonuses are only good if you hate to grind and don’t mind waiting longer for everything in the game.
If you insist on wasting your medals on flat bonuses, do it “the” “right” way. “The” “right” way: Wait until you are only 2.5 million away from what you need for an expensive thing before you buy the bonus. As you’ve probably realized, getting that last 2.5 million is often harder than the first 7 million, because everybody wants to raid you when you’ve got a large loot store, and you lose more from each raid.
Spacing it out to one flat bonus per thing you upgrade, to get you past the final hump, will help to reduce the average amount of loot that you lose to raids, helping you to get more upgrades started over the course of the month.
To increase this benefit further, alternate gold and elixir or keep one depleted with wall upgrades such that you only ever have much of one resource at a time. This makes you very unappealing as a raid target, and will help you reach your goals more easily.
Training potion: Versatile. Most obviously useful for rapid-fire queen/goblin loot sniping, but also any kind of raiding. Easily nets more than 2.5 million of gold or elixir if done properly, so much better than flat bonuses.
Much cheaper to donate units quickly than using gems, even if you have the gold pass.
Can also be used in conjunction with hero and power potions to let you pull off more attacks with them than otherwise, multiplying the benefit of those two types of potions.
Best rate (tied with wall rings) for selling league points into gems.
Resource potion: Results may vary, based on how many collectors of what level you have. Kind of a pain to try to time it and remember to log in and get your loot before it fills up or gets looted, especially if you have more than one account. To collect the full boost for DE, you’d have to avoid getting looted at all and log in every 10 hours and 45 minutes during the boost.
Ultimately, with every collector maxed out, none looted, and no collectors reaching storage capacity, you will earn:
0.94 million gold 0.94 million elixir 10 thousand dark elixir
For an easy comparison, if you used two and a half resource potions (same cost as a flat bonus), you would earn about 2.5 million of BOTH elixir and gold, plus 25k dark elixir.
Thus, resource potions used optimally are worth twice as much in basic resources as flat bonuses, plus with a bonus 25k dark elixir, on a medal-for-medal comparison.
Still, however, you could get a training potion instead of this, and easily use a swarm of goblins to generate more than that total — and much faster and without stressing about log-in timing, too.
If you really, really hate grinding, or if you are unwilling to drop trophies to farm, this may be your best option for acquiring resources.
Research potion: Saves 1 day for 20 medals. How many days of research are involved in maxing an account? 1509 days. So each research potion is worth .066% of all research. Thus each medal is 0.0033% of total research.
Definitely not worth getting, but I’ll talk about it often to describe how valuable hammers are.
Builder potion: Boosts up to 6 workers x10 for an hour, or in other words, can be worth as much as 54 hours, or 2.25 days of saved builder time. You need 5216 builder days to finish everything, so each of these is about .043% of all build time. Thus, each medal is worth a maximum .0014% of all build time.
Now, it might seem that this means builder potions are less than half as good a deal as research potions. However, you don’t use all of your research upgrades in every attack, whereas you do use every building and hero you upgrade in every defense. So, maxing out your defenses will not take as long as maxing out all of your research, which means you’ll finish your account sooner if you boost research. But, you only need a few maxed attacks to 3-star enemy maxed accounts, but all your defenses need to be close to max before you can withstand their attacks. So, maxing defense has a bigger impact on your war game.
Builder or research potions are both the “best” options for TH8 and below. The true best option is to save up your medals for hammers in the late game.
Wall Ring: 10 wall upgrades for 50 medals. This is double the value, in resources, that you get from flat resources, so if you’re working walls, it’s 2nd best. Training potion is the best. A very, very marginal improvement for your base compared with the other options.
Hammers of fighting & spells: These are very often the best, because they save you both the resource and time cost of the upgrade. However, because their value goes up each level, they are not good purchases very early on.
Research potion costs 20, these hammers cost 120, so as soon as an upgrade takes more than 6 days to complete, it is not only instant to use the hammer instead, but you save the resource costs, too. This first occurs when you get to TH9. Hammers can also be used to upgrade dark elixir troops, potentially saving you a much more scarce resource, and therefore a lot of farming time.
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Recognize that you can store up to 2500 league medals. There is no reason why you necessarily “need” to spend them until you are about to win new ones from a league that won’t fit in your storage. Just spend as much as you gain each month if you approach max capacity.
This will be of great benefit to you, as the hammers have a flat price, but the costs and times for upgrades increase proportionally. So, using medals for hammers or anythinge else early on has much less value than saving them up for later.
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To compare value, we will measure using the resource potion rate, and we will give a low weight estimate of dark elixir being worth 100x as much as gold or elixir, which produces a rate of about “3 million resources per 10 medals.” This may be an underestimate, if you value DE much more, or an overestimate if you value DE less because you are maxing walls. We’ll just use it knowing it is imperfect.
We will couple this with the research potion rate which we will round up to 1 day of reduction per 20 medals. By adding the resources saved and time saved, we can get an estimate for the total value of a hammer.
For example, consider this chart for dragons, from the clash of clans fandom page. You should check out that site, if you have not already. All the raw data publicly available is compiled there!
Level 2 dragon upgrade requires about 6.6 medals worth of resources and 80 medals of time, so a hammer there has a “value” of 86.6.
Level 6 dragon upgrade requires 30 medals of resources and 200 medals of time, for a value of 230.
Level 8 dragon upgrade requires 50 medals of resources and 320 medals of time, for a value of 370.
Okay, now the research potion is obviously worse when the upgrade takes 6 potions or more to get through, so we will use the upgrade below that as the baseline for the value of using potions instead of hammers.
The last time potions would be useful is for TH8, dragon level 3, when the hammer would be worth 10 medals of resources and 100 medals of time, for a value of 110. Because its list price is higher than its “value” that is why potions would be better.
We can therefore use 110/120 as the value for potions, in contrast to 230/120 as the value of hammers at TH9, and 370/120 as the value of hammers at TH13!
The longer you wait to use your league points, the more value you can get from spending them later. Like up to x3.
It is best not to use them at all in the early levels, so that you can advance rapidly during the much lengthier and time-consuming late game stages.
This is my best mini account. I actually have a lot of ways to spend these hammers, but I am saving them. You see, the day before TH13 broke, I had 1200 medals and 1 of each hammer ready to go. During that first CWL, although I am a lowly F2P player, I was able attack with max edrag, balloon, freeze, rage, and a level 5(+5) royal champion! I’m saving up for TH14. Should have 1200, every hammer, and every book again by then.
Of course, you do not need to wait for TH14 to apply this. You can make sure you blitz instantly into maxed out troops and spells with each TH upgrade if you save up enough hammers and medals beforehand!
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Hammer of Building: This costs the same as the other hammers, but its value is pretty different, because it is based on workers instead of the lab. As you recall, a builder potion cuts 2.25 days for 30 medals.
Let’s look at the stats for wizard tower, because wizard tower is my favorite defensive tower:
So, using a hammer to push a wiz tower to level 2 would save you about 1 medal worth of gold and 4 medals worth of builder time, for a total of 5 medals, and a value of 5/120.
Using a hammer for the level 9 wizard tower saves you about 17 medals worth of resources and like 75 medals worth of time, for a total of about 92, and value of 92/120.
Using the hammer for the level 12 wizard tower will save you about 53 medals worth of resources and 210 medals worth of build time, for a total of 263 and a value of 263/120. As you can see, this is not as good of a value as the research hammers, except, again, you know you’ll use your defenses in every single battle, whereas most research is optional or even superfluous.
Hammer of heroes: This is the most expensive item, but it is definitely my favorite. Using the same method for evaluating, we will look at this chart. The chart for Archer Queen is so huge that we won’t look at the whole thing.
Now for the purposes of calculating resource potion’s value, we used a conversion factor of x100 between DE and elixir/gold, to assume roughly equal value of the resources. However, DE is not fungible through walls like the other two, and it is much more likely to be the limiting factor in your upgrades. So, approximating the value of a hammer saving DE is much more questionable. We’ll still use the numbers from before for easy comparison, acknowledging that hero hammers are likely undervalued by this approximation.
So, if you were to use a hero hammer to get level 6 queen, it would save you 10 medals worth of resources and and about 13 medals worth of time, for a value of 23/165
Using a hammer for the level 50 archer queen saves you about 66 medals of resources and 90 medals of time, for a value of 156/165.
Using a hammer for a level 70 archer queen saves you 100 medals of resources and 90 medals of time, for a value of 190/165.
However, if you consider the gold and elixir from the resource potion to be largely worthless for you, then this triples the relative values for the hammers, up to 570/165 for the archer queen! That’s about on par 370/120 for the best research options — but Archer queen is used in every attack and every defense, so the benefits could also be said to have twice as much impact or more, since research is often optional anyway, for a comparative value of as much as 1040/165!
If you value dark elixir a lot more than the other resources, then hammers for upgrading heroes and dark troops have much greater value. In my case, I have too many minis to grind with all of them, so I rely heavily on hammers for high level upgrades that require dark elixir. Nothing comes close to the same value, for me.
As a final note, I don’t want to go fully into the limitations on builder potions, but I will mention that they affect potentially 6 builds at once, reducing each by only 9 hours. Utilizing builder potions fully means having all 6 builders working, so it’s for the more active players only.
This also has important implications for hero upgrades and war participation. Now, if you are like me, you mainly see magic items as a way to get your upgrades done while also still participating in war fully. Therefore, time saved from upgrades is much more valuable if it lets you have all your heroes for war than if it just cuts down random time until you’re maxed out.
If we look only at build time and ignore resource costs, this means that it is easily possible for builder potions to be a better value than hero hammers. For instance, if you are upgrading all four heroes at once, each builder potion reduces hero upgrade time by 1.5 days, at a rate of 0.05 days per medal. In contrast, hammers reduce time by a maximum of 7, at a rate of about 0.042 per medal. As a kicker, you also get 9 hours of boost for each of two non-hero upgrades from the potion. Builder potion is a substantially better value when ignoring resource costs.
In order to remain ready for war during this process, all you need to do is time things properly and have enough potions. If you attack in the first hour of one war and the last hour of the next war, then you can have about 3 days of upgrade time, leaving only 4 days to fill with builder potions. Each potion is 3/8 days, so you need only 11 potions and good timing, even with a clan that is literally always at war. 11 builder potions happen to be exactly the cost of two hero hammers, meaning that if you upgrade four heroes at once, this strategy can double the rate you upgrade your heroes while still maintaining war readiness as compared with buying hammers.
The rate can be more than doubled if you are able to acquire additional builder potions from other sources, because those would otherwise not have been as effective at maintaining war readiness. It takes a threshold number of them before they enable you not to skip wars. Additionally, if your clan has longer intervals between wars, you can use about 4 fewer potions per extra day they wait. Clan leaders with members pushing heroes, take heed.
Furthermore, if your build times have been reduced 10%-20% by the gold pass, each hammer has a muted effect, but builder potions are unaffected, further shifting the balance in favor of builder potions.
Statues: Incalculable value. Each one speaks for itself.
Some may say you have not truly completed your base until you have gotten all four statues.
I am sorry I said that to some of you, who will now need to spend 1800 medals on statues. Okay, not sorry.
The Grand Summary
In almost every case, it is best for you to save up your league medals as long as possible, as the bargains from hammers get better and better with each town hall upgrade. Nothing you could get early comes anywhere close to the utility. Besides, early game things do not take long to build or save up to buy.
If you have a full league medal stash, or you just can’t wait that long, you can use the calculations from before to figure out what’s best for you, but that will only matter in the TH8–TH9 range. Below that, it is always research or builder potion, and above that, it is always hammers.
Still, even if every upgrade cost no resources, hammers will be better as soon as research takes 6 days or buildings take 9 days. Potions are just not in the same league.
There is one exception, which is the training potion, because this is extremely dependent on your play style, priorities, and how often you play. It is far and away the best item for resources, if you have time to spend on grinding, so all the other options have much reduced resource savings when compared against this option, for certain players.
The exception to that exception is that if you already have more resources than you can find builders to work with, there is no benefit to boosting your farming, in which case time reduction items would be infinitely better. And, of course, late game hammers are the best time reduction items.
As a preferential note, those who prioritize early war readiness (and its potential for them to earn higher CWL medal rewards!!) may find it worthwhile to buy hammers of fighting and spells far sooner than TH13.
I hope you found this guide useful and informative in seeing what benefits each item provides. How you value those benefits will be personal, and I can’t tell you what will make the most sense for you, but I do believe I have provided a framework for you to determine it for yourself with ease. Let me know in the comments if you have any remaining questions!
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If you liked this guide, you might like to check out some of my other Clash guides, also published here under Mr. Way’s School of Clash.
Want to chat with me and/or others about the game? Join our discord! You do not need to join one of our clans, but we welcome you to!
I also write about personal finance. Check it out here!
