The case for making card donations

Here’s the thing, you don’t have to play Clash Royale very long before you discover that gold is a major limiting factor in your progress. A lot of experienced players save up their gems to buy gold because upgrades get to be very expensive. You’ll look at your cards and see a dozen of them waiting to be upgraded because you can only afford to upgrade the ones that you use a lot. What do you do with the rest?

Donate them! Seriously, if someone else is asking for those cards, give them away.

1. Donating helps the clan by redistributing cards from players that don’t use them, to players that will.
2. Donating helps you because you get experience points which will level up your towers AND gold to buy those upgrades I was just talking about.

Let’s run some numbers

Using my account as an example, I have unlocked 36 cards. I have three decks each with 8 cards, that’s 24. So if I repeat none of the cards in any of my decks, there will be 12 cards that I cannot use. However, everyone has favorite cards that they use in multiple decks. The truth is, I have a lot more cards sidelined than 12. I try to buy the upgrades for the cards that are in my decks, I leave the other ones alone. I have 11 upgrades waiting to be upgraded. That’s 11 cards that I obviously don’t use and even more than that that are sidelined outside of my decks. I would prefer to give all of those away so that I can get more gold and experience points.

No question about it, if someone requests one of those cards I’m pounding that donate button every time.

You can request 10 cards every 8 hours (or one rare, which counts as 10 donations). That means, you can request 30 cards a day. Also, there is a limit of 60 cards per day that you can donate. So you can donate 2:1. The players in our clan each average 15 donations per day. So that flips the donation ratio to 1:2. Guess what? I’m okay with that. I’d rather see that you’re donating 1:1. But, if you’re hitting the clan average, then no one is going to bust your chops about donations.

Card hoarding doesn’t pay

Literally. donating cards gives you gold and experience. It makes the clan stronger as a whole because it moves cards to the people who are using them. Your card count does nothing for you because you won’t have the gold to upgrade them unless you’re ready to start spending real cash for gems.

If that’s your strategy then Supercell thanks you for your support. This clan will expect to see your investment paying off in your trophy count. That doesn’t seem to be happening though. If you look at our top ten players you will almost always see 10 players with high donation counts.

So, what do we do about people who don’t donate?

I like the recommendation to check a player’s lifetime donation stat before giving them cards. It’s only fair, if they don’t donate then other players shouldn’t feel obligated to give to them either. Remember, the donation stat on the leader board resets Sunday nights. Low counts at the beginning of the week don’t mean much. Also, you can tap the info button on the request to see a donation stat but that’s actually YOUR donations for the day (it tells you how close you are to donation cool down). The lifetime stat on the player’s profile page is the safest.

Should we kick them out of the clan? Maybe. We use a formula that considers donation and trophy count equally. If the clan is full then players with low donation counts AND low trophy counts are the first out to make room for new players. A player with zero donations may survive if they are a trophy beast.

Are there cards that you shouldn’t donate?

This is a personal call. Some players will tell you to give them all away and you’ll get back more of the ones that need from your requests. I find this to be true for the commons but maybe not for the more popular rare cards. Personally, I usually have one or two cards that I’m focused on upgrading and I’ll donate everything but those. Maybe you want to hold all the cards in your strongest deck. However you decide to do it, you’re going to have plenty of cards that you’ll be able to give away. There shouldn’t be any reason you aren’t meeting or exceeding the clan’s donation average every week.

But the bottom line is, if you don’t want to help fill card requests then you’ve picked the wrong clan. We think it’s pretty important. I’m sure you have thoughts, put them in the comments.