Our clan family is 10 years old today ! When me and my eldest sat down back in January 2014 to think up a name for a new Clash clan I never expected we still be here and very active a decade later. Since those early days Toxic Whales has grown and continued to thrive. It’s been quite a journey with a few set backs along the way, but our clans in Clash, Brawl and Royale are all going strong . The majority of our members are long-termers too bringing great stability.

Thank you to everyone who has made this a fun and rewarding journey. Let’s see what the next 10 years brings !

It’s been a long haul to get promoted to Master League in CWL but we finally got there. Over a year of CWL including four second place finishes has been quite a journey. Last month we even won all seven wars but still didn’t get top spot. So this a great achievement by the clan. Well done everyone who played !

It was last March when I first created a single image of our entire club but by popular request I’ve been asked to update it. Reflecting back on the old image compared to this new one shows staggering progress for 10 months. We were at 1.2 million trophies then, now over 2 million. We were doing OK on the UK leaderboard but now we are solidly in the top 40. But more surprising are the individual player trophies. In March 18964 trophies was our top player, now that would put you in 74th place. We currently have 58 players over 20000 trophies. Amazing progress !

Oh, and we are still the Blue Penny Crew !

It’s been a while coming but I’d like to formally announce our club tournaments ! The first one will start on Thursday 19th November at 8pm.

We’ve never really seemed to achieve our true potential in CWL. There always seems to be attacks being missed which holds us back in close wars. Admittedly you need a level of dedication in CWL with 7 back to back wars.

But finally this season everything came together and we finished second and finally got promoted.

It was a real delight to see all 75 out of 75 attacks were used. The same team of 15 stayed in the fight for the entire week. Here’s the team photo. Great job guys !

In Clash we’ve been a bit up and down in CWL, but everything came good this month. In the middle of the league season we got to a level 14 clan and then had a perfect CWL winning every war. The injection of players from our other clans has really helped us become more active again and the clan is buzzing more than it has for a while. Onwards and upwards !

What I think we really enjoyed about this league season was the balance acroos the clans. Many of the wars were close and it went down to the wire at the end. And the final result was second place on identical trophies to the winners. Next season will be a test. Will their be engineered clans ? Do we have enough strength in depth ? Time will tell….

The problem ? The season bank ! Now I know this seems crazy but all that loot, treasury full, all collectors full and all six builders busy for a few days. Look at the resources !

I just want to spend it but can’t. Day after day I see the same thing until finally a builder comes free, then I just splurge all the elixir on walls, splash the gold on the new defences…. then sit back for a few more days. Being in legend league it can’t even be stolen in a raid !

As I said a first world problem. At least I don’t have the same issue in my builder base… Oh wait, that’s completely maxed 🙂

At long last, and by request of several people in the club, here’s a Brawl Stars blog post !

So why is this article called Blue Penny Gang ? Hopefully the following picture should give a fairly big clue…

Did you spot it ? Yes, the entire club has Penny as their logo and their name in dark blue. From what we know very few clubs have even attempted this unified look never mind actually achieved it.

So the question is how did we manage to get our entire club to convert, given many members don’t speak English nor read chat ? Well it wasn’t easy and it took a while.

Once we decided to try to do the unified look the first thing we needed to decide on was which icon and which colour. There was a healthy debate within the club about this. Take the next bit not entirely seriously…  So we decided to have a vote. As club president I make the rules and I decided that only the club president has a vote. So by unanimous verdict blue Penny was decided. It’s democracy…. but not as you know it. So why blue Penny ? Well, my name was already in blue and my icon was already Penny, read in to that what you will. However Penny was my first power 10 brawler, and I also thought the crazy grin was suitable for the crazy idea we were pursuing.

Now the big challenge; how do we get everyone else to change ? The first 25-30 or so were easy, they were all our very active and/or senior players so they just changed. Over the next week or so about 70% of the club also converted. Then the grind started. A few of us just endlessly nagged the ones who hadn’t changed and slowly it was turning in to Penny party. Helpfully we had some bilingual speakers who could relay what we were doing to some of the non-English speakers too. By the time we got up to about 90 our goal was finally in sight so it was time to change tack…

We already had a rule that anyone inactive for 7 days would be kicked so we knew everyone was active so the non-Penny’s were either ignoring us or just being stubborn. We took a simple tactic to get this sorted; we just kicked everyone who hadn’t changed ! 🙂

So the Blue Penny Gang was finally live ! We’ve had this look now for a few weeks and still need to work to maintain it, but it’s pretty easy now. When someone joins if they haven’t changed already then don’t tend to last long… sometimes minutes before they are removed.

I have no idea what everyone will think if I suddenly decide I would like to be in the Red Spike Gang….

So if you are in another club and want to go for a unified look, then all you need is a very active club, a few friendly people who would like to achieve the same goal who are also ruthless enough to kick on anyone who gets in the way of it making it happen…

Finally, the update is almost here with the new brawler, and given I recently went to max it’s time to stack up the boxes…

Fingers crossed I’ll get it after a mammoth box opening session. Good luck to the rest of the club too !

For those of you not in Legend League in CoC I thought I would give you a view of what it’s actually like to play a whole season and struggle up the leader board. In the October season I placed 72020th global and around 800th UK with 5351 trophies.

So how does it work ?

Firstly you get a new base that is only used for legend defences. This means your home village becomes irrelevant so many people now have crazy designs because it won’t be attacked. This also means you can’t lose any resources, and there are no convential guards or shields.

Each day you can attack 8 times and defend up to 8 times. So this really is a war of skill. Your opponents are selected with a similar trophy count to make it fair. And it’s not all about attacking, your defence is absolutely key too. Up to 40 trophies are available for each attack, and you can lose up to 40 for each defence. Trophies are awarded depending on how many stars you gain and the percentage of damage done. It’s really important to try to get 2 stars. Some examples; 3 stars gains the full 40, 84% 2 stars gains 27, 96% 1 star gains 15, 40% 1 star gains 4. As you can see the stars are the key, with damage counting for less.

So let’s see how I did as the season progressed. I managed to complete all 280 available attacks and had to defend 262 times. Here’s the numbers for the stars gained or lost in each battle:

As you can see I was getting a 3 star around 10% of the time, and being 3 starred the same amount. There’s definitely room for improvement there ! What gave me the trophy raise was more 2 star wins and those times I wasn’t attacked. However that’s not all. To add some context here’s my daily gains or losses. I gained on 22 days and lost on 14.

When the season started I was using a base I copied from Itzu and was trying out some new armies. My progress was relatively slow, and once more people had seen the base and worked out how to beat it I starting going backwards as you can see on days 17 and 18. So what happened on days 19 to 22 to turn around my fortunes ? Simple, I changed to a base most people won’t have seen before and suddenly my opponents were racking up 0 and 1 stars on me. So this really shows you how important defence us. Here’s a graph showing my trophy count at the end of each day.

Notice again the big rise on days 19 to 22, and then it all levels off. So why was that ? Well this really is a game of skill now and I think with my army, defensive base and my personal skill I hit a plateau. Remember as you gain trophies you are battling players at a similar level, so as you climb your opponents skill increases, their base designs becomes better etc.. So it seems that this really is a true reflection of where I am in the game relative to my opponents.

So how do I climb higher ? Firstly I need to master some of the new meta attacks like P.E.K.K.A BoBat and Queen Charge Hog, and secondly I need to come up with another strong base that no-one has seen before. To that end I’m not really competing in the November season and instead just practising these new attacks ready for the December season. Time will tell whether this will improve my leader board position. Fingers crossed it pays off.

For those of you not yet in legend league it is certainly something to aspire to and not having to sit in the clouds is great. However be warned if you aren’t a pretty loaded TH12 you might find your stay above 5000 trophies very short lived… Good luck, and may your archer queen stop shooting walls…

After nearly 7 years of CoC I finally made it on to one of the leader boards ! The new legend league format is much better then time based one we used to have. Here I am at UK 154th which is around 9000th in global. I’m very happy !