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…