History of Clash Royale's Most Polarizing Card

the Expo is a card you don't see much in Clash Royale nowadays it's most famously known for being the most defensive card in Clash Royale and if you know anything about Clash Royale balancing you know supercell typically keeps defensive cards in a worse position than most other cards nowadays the expo's use rate is typically about two percent with a win rate in the mid to low 40s in Grand challenges making this card statistically one of the worst in the game but it wasn't always this way the Expo has had a flourishing history that has had a huge influence in The Meta providing a different way to play Clash Royale that was widely frowned upon by the community a good chunk of people would probably tell you Expo is their least favorite card as a result of the frustrating memories they have with it which is likely why despite the subpar rates does not receive above its last balance change was in 2020 and has just sort of been phasing out since then so let's talk about the history of this card observe the decks it's been in its ups and downs observed the impact it's had on the game and how it ended up where it is today but first we need to talk about honkai impact third how impact third is a 3D crossover anime Adventure game that features a vast open World by hoyovers the version 6.7 update just released and there is a lot the main story comes to chapter 38 where things have been happening in the sea of quanta the connection between the two seals is no coincidence this is a concrete manifestation of the bubble universe's background rules different from those of the real world and this difference will certainly present notable challenges to our protagonists let's first talk about the new character Shigeru Kira she has a new battle suit called sugary Starburst which is a mech-type ice damage dealer she deals damage with pistols while also providing combat Buffs to her teammates there's also a new event called perfect performance where captains get glow light sticks to boost stage preparation progress and Grant combat Buffs they can play different modes to earn tokens which can be used to exchange for a variety of items including a new outfit there's a lot more to check out so make sure you download the game using the link in the description or the pins comment and use the code Kira now for bonus items the Expo is one of the 42 OG cards in Clash Royale meaning it's been in the game since the very first day of beta this was one of the many cars inspired by a defensive building in Clash of Clans the Expo was one of the more expensive buildings in Clash Royale at six Elixir the same as the Canon and the mortar the Expo boxed out both of these buildings for obvious reasons although the Canon had more Health than the Expo the Expo had much more range being able to snipe a princess Tower from the user's side of the river and although the mortar could also do this the Expo had a higher DPS and was the only building of the three that could Target air troops the cannon and mortar both saw little to no usage in top ladder while the Expo had a staggering 28 use rate it could double as a defensive building and a win condition it was considered to be a very strong card because of the 13 tile range it had you could place it three tiles from the bridge and it would still reach the opponent's Tower allowing for defensive buildings to be placed in front of it while it shot the tower it also had a deploy time of 3 seconds forcing a very quick reaction because it could lock onto the tower as soon as it was finished deploying and there was no way to stun or redirect the Expo once it had already locked on there was nothing like Electro Wizard or zappies yet and zap and lightning had yet to receive any sort of stun ability it was incredibly stressful to play against since even a fraction of a second too late was extremely punishing and could easily cost the defender the entire game and of course there was no earthquake to deal with this building heavy meta either this was also the reason Inferno Tower was quite strong during this era and you would actually often see people using Inferno Tower to defend their Expo the Expo wouldn't even remain in its original state for a month before it received its first balance change on February 2nd 2016 the Expo would get two different changes it would lose 15 of its hit points meaning a rocket would now fully take it out it would also lose its ability to Target air troops which at the time was certainly a nerve but thinking about it long term might be arguable that that's considered a rework since cards like Lava Hounds that would be added later could have been good counters to Expo if it could still attack air the k Cannon and mortar also got Elixir reductions leaving the Expo as the only six Elixir building the Expo was still quite good maintaining a 16 use rate in top ladder after the balance changes but only one week after this set of balance changes the game would get another set of balance changes nerfing the Expo again on February 9th the expo's deploy time would be increased from 3 seconds to 5 Seconds giving the opponent much more time to react this Nerf was much more devastating than the previous Nerf and thus the use rate dropped to only five percent the card certainly wasn't dead but nowhere near as powerful as it used to be regardless though a lot of people were complaining about the Expo pointing out how unfun the game felt with such defensive cards like Expo being viable it was not a card that made the game feel fun back in these days overtime was only one minute instead of the two to three minutes that it would be later and since there was no form of tiebreaker it was common for a lot of matches that involved Expo to Simply end in a draw to quote supercell they stated a core design philosophy of clash Royale is offense over defense we've always found gameplay based on attacking rather than defending to be much more enjoyable to play and entertaining to watch Expo was the antithesis to supercell's balancing goals so on March 23 2016 the expo's range would be decreased from 13 tiles to 12 tiles so you had to play the Expo closer to the bridge in order for it to connect to the tower this overall seemed like a healthy change because it meant you couldn't just put a hidden Tesla in front of it to completely block it while the Expo hits the tower it would require a bit more strategy to get value out of your Expo now the card was undoubtedly worse off with less range it still had the same top ladder use rate as before though so it didn't seem completely dead but rather kind of Niche at this point in time it was probably one of the most hated cards in the game so there weren't exactly cause for a direct buff to the card only a few days later on April 1st though supercell did something pretty crazy as a response to the Expo hate the change they made was now allowing your Expo to Target your own princess Tower if you paid attention to the date I said this happened on you probably know why they did this this obviously it was just a joke and actually wasn't in the real game but on a separate build of the game exclusive to YouTubers who were meant to show off gameplay of this as part of the quote-unquote new update to bewilder the community the question at this point though was how was supercell going to make such a defensive frustrating card into something healthy for the game for the years to come on May 3rd 2016 the Expo would get yet another nerve reducing its range once again by another half tile this was actually the intended range for the Expo as it was never supposed to be 12. so this was simply to fix that but it certainly was not good for the Expo in terms of getting it into a balanced state after this Nerf the expo's use rate was officially down to zero percent in top ladder but this drop to zero was likely more due to the buff the Royal giant God in the same balance change making him appear in over one quarter of top ladder decks the Royal giant was extremely strong during this period and this was not good for Expo because the Royal giant was practically a hard counter to the card the Royal giant wasn't going away anytime soon so the Expo continued to have trouble finding a spot in the meta so in June 2016 the Expo would get some slight reversions to some Nerfs it had previously received to hopefully bring it back its deployment time would be decreased to 4 seconds while also getting its original 15 Health Nerf reverted now allowing it to survive a rocket once again the card's top ladder use rate briefly Rose to a whopping two percent before falling right back down to zero the Royal giant was simply too dominant to give the Expo any chance to thrive in this environment the Expo being so expensive made it less versatile overall it actually became sort of a meme in the community that getting exposed from a super magical chest was the worst luck you could have arguably it might have been the worst card in the game but Grand challenges didn't exist yet so it's hard to tell exactly just from ladder stats for months and months the Expo would continually wallow at a zero percent use rate seemingly hopeless but the Royal giant would finally get a real nerve come August of 2016 which opened up some potential for the Expo to make a comeback although you began to see some Expo play by September October is when things really would start to pick up for the card Expo rose from a three percent use rate to a 19 use rate in just one month this Expo deck was the most popular variation you would see and was the second most used deck in top ladder overall for October 2016 and six of the eight cards in it just happened to be the sixth most popular cards at the time this was a fairly cheap deck despite the Expo being so expensive the idea being able to quickly cycle to your Expo so that the opponent's best counters were out of hand Expo may not have been the strongest card but it certainly showed that it had potential if it locked onto the tower just once that was almost a guaranteed win for the Expo player however by November the use rate of Expo dropped from 19 back to just 3 and this was really just a factor of environment in November there was a lot less giant due to the poison Nerf and a lot more Golem lightning which worked much better against Expo than most other decks Expo bowler was another variant you started to see pop up around this time but it was never that popular it was clear that the expo's main purpose was to thrive in cycle decks which had a few different variants around the time none of these Expo decks could really compete with some of the more established archetypes like Lava Hound hog rider or Golem however the Expo clearly had the potential to thrive given the right environment and the coming months would prove this in fact in the December 2016 season an expo deck finished in the number one spot in the world in January of the following year Expo would begin to make a considerable rise to 9 nine percent usage in one specific deck which became the third most popular deck in top ladder overall but this was very brief as it quickly dropped to just three percent before the month even ended going into February Expo evolved to include the musketeer and elixir collector rising to being the number three deck in top ladder and later in the month this Expo deck Rose to being the number two deck I found it really interesting that Expo decks were often being seen in the top three decks yet wouldn't appear anywhere else in the top 10. Expo really only worked in very specific decks yet thrived in ones it did work in unlike Golem or hog rider where you'd see several different variants on the top deck list if they were popular despite all the different Expo decks you would see pop up over time the playstyle was very identical across them all the Expo player places the Expo and buys the Expo as much time as it needs by distracting defensive cards with cheap cards even if the Expo only has a fraction of its Health by the time it locks on it's basically GG not to mention the Expo could also double as a pretty good defensive building cycling spells was also part of expo's play play Style Fireball and log were both very popular spells almost always seen with the Expo since most Expo decks could be cycled through faster than other decks it was easy to get three or four Fireballs on the opponent's Tower one stubble Elixir hit in about 20 seconds The Inferno Tower was often seen with the Expo as well to deal great damage to tanks this card was very important since Expo was not a good Tank Killer and cheap cards like archers and mega minion were of course not meant to be relied upon for dealing with tanks however in March 2017 supercell would accidentally kill the Expo alongside a new update now there isn't a lot of details or information here but I've put a lot of research into trying to figure out exactly what happened I'll try to explain it the best I can basically what it seems like is there was a bug that severely increased the amount of time it took for the Expo to change targets the way the Expo would change targets was completely messed up when other troops were around it killing troops that the Expo was trying to Target this especially made it suck when it was going against skeleton army or graveyard this bug was only in the game for three days before it was fixed so I couldn't even find any footage on YouTube of the Expo during this brief period however the archers were also affected by this bug and as you can see their targeting was completely messed up preventing them from killing swarms of troops this is basically what was going on with the Expo I wish I knew more about this bug but unfortunately that's really all I have this was only in the game for three days before it was fixed and in the fixing process its hit speed was decreased from 0.3 seconds to 0.25 seconds its first hit attack speed was also decreased 1 20th of a second may sound like nothing but this increased its total DPS by 17 which came to really help this card as we go through 2017 the Expo archetype would continue to widely stay the same getting slight substitutions as The Meta developed you would see some dwindle in its popularity in the coming months due to Golem night witch Bridge fam and Three Musketeers healed dominating the game from May through the beginning of August so in August the Expo would get a deploy time decrease from 4 seconds to 3.5 seconds also this month Clash Royale saw its first ever 20 win Challenge and this Expo deck was very popular in this challenge having no defensive building instead replacing The Inferno Tower with Inferno Dragon to take care of tanks with the main advantage being that its one Elixir cheaper and every Elixir counts when you're trying to keep the deck cheap although the deploy Time Buff certainly did help the card Expo was still pretty Niche at least it would be until October 2017 where one balance change would completely change the course of the card practically overnight on October 9th 2017 the Hidden Tesla would finally get some attention in the balance changes it was a card that for a while was considered to be awful so it was time for a rework it would hit slower now but do 41 more damage than before this change made the Tesla very strong and it turns out the Tesla worked way better in Expo than Inferno Tower or Inferno Dragon did the Tesla wasn't as great as taking out tanks obviously but it still got the job done and was far superior at picking off small troops than The Inferno Tower could ever hope to especially given that it now one shot minions not to mention it did have that you unique ability to be completely immune to any form of damage when it was not attacking and hidden underground so for example if you had a Tesla and Expo at the bridge and they rocketed it they could damage the Expo but not hit the Tesla then you could cycle back to another Expo and still have that original Tesla there to help expo's use rate quickly Rose in top ladder from 4 to 12 these two decks became very popular you had your standard fast cycle Expo deck but also this incredibly defensive Ice Wizard rocket tornado deck Tesla definitely had more trouble dealing with the Golem Than The Inferno Tower did but it worked better in just about any other circumstance however the meta was certainly not done developing yet this Expo deck was floating around in challenges as well as being used by a couple players in top ladder incorporating the overpowered Goblin hut and you would still see a lot of Expo with Elixir collector as well but towards the end of 2017 one of the if not the most iconic Expo deck ever would begin to rise this would later be known as Expo 2.9 consisting of these specific eight cards averaging to 2.9 Elixir at the time nobody could expect the long-term impact this deck would have on the game it wasn't seen as any more special than any of the other decks at the time but this deck was still unique it was the cheapest Expo deck that was popular which allowed for a much faster cycle than any of the other popular ones it was the most popular one in December and January the following year you would still see Mega minion instead of skeletons a lot of the time but the skeleton variant was only becoming more and more popular as time went on by the end of January beginning of February Expo 2.9 was the number two deck in the game spotted being used by 28 of the top 200 ladder players just barely behind Mega Knight zap8 and the Expo itself was up to a 17 use rate almost exclusively appearing in Expo 2.9 when we look at the Grand Challenge statistics from March 2018 Expo 2.9 was by far the most popular deck it had a 58 win rate too which is very high but there's also a stat that we need to look at to really determine the impacts this deck was having it's a stat that I've never brought up before and that was draw rate draw rate is pretty irrelevant today since tiebreakers prevent this from happening most of the time Expo 2.9 had a draw rate of 12 meaning only 30 percent of matches that Expo 2.9 was played in resulted in a loss a 12 draw rate was pretty high but abusing the draw mechanic was part of the strategy of Expo it was so defensive and some matches you just couldn't win which meant the strategy was simply running out the clock also around this time you were beginning to see a lot more substitutions of the night replacing the ice Golem this night variant had an even higher draw rate at 14 and only 27 of the matches it was used in resulted in a loss for the user the only Decks that had a higher draw rate than this were mortar decks which coincidentally happens to be the only other Siege win condition in the game this deck was really starting to frustrate players as it felt impossible to break through and the worst part was that it was just boring to play against there was really no creativity when it came to playing this deck or against it it was still essentially putting an expo at the bridge and spamming small troops to defend it and despite this it was actually considered to be the highest skilled deck in Clash Royale ever I'm not going to argue in this video the level of skill it takes to play Expo but I just think it's unreasonable to consider a deck that only lost about one in four matches to be super high skill especially because it was so popular it definitely took a considerable amount of skill in some instances to maximize the value of the Tesla skeletons and Ice Spirit but as long as you learned a few basic placements you could easily have success with this deck spell cycling was a very effective strategy with this deck because even though using a fireball on nothing may give the opponent to four Elixir Advantage you could easily earn that value back by defending massive pushes with very cheap cards the deck definitely seemed to work better on ladder though because the Clash Royale matches were actually structured a little differently which made a big deal for this deck in challenges over time lasted 3 minutes however on ladder overtime was only one minute which led to many more draws which benefited the Expo player by now the mega minion was phased out of Expo 2.9 completely the only slight variation you would see is the the night for the ice Golem however you would still see the mega minion appear sometimes in the Ice Wizard tornado rocket variant which was still quite popular and some say was even more defensive than Expo 2.9 in April 2.9 straw rate only continued to rise and became the number one draw deck surpassing mortar now at 24 it had a 40 win rate which is usually bad but it would still only lose about 35 percent of its total matches just to give you an idea of how high a 24 draw rate really is just know that on this list of the top 20 most popular Decks at the time the second highest draw rate on this exact day was 15 from a hog rider mortar deck and nearly half of them had less than a one percent draw rate by May 2.9's draw rate peaked at 25 although certainly no longer the most popular deck in the game was still very prominent and notable for how defensive it was also by now remember that it's been the dominant variant of Expo for at least six months the next direct change to the Expo would come in June but it wasn't really a balance change but just a bug fix to fix an issue where the Expo wouldn't shoot troops at the edge of its range occasionally Expo had already been steadily declining in popularity for a few months now one reason was due to the Ice Spirit in April 2018 getting a hefty nerve decreasing its freeze duration by half a second and decreasing its damage as we keep going through 2018 into 2019 we would see several more indirect Nerfs to the Expo in June we would see an ice Golem Health Nerf of 5 which obviously makes it absorb less damage also in June 3-minute overtime would be brought to ladder which was an indirect Nerf to the Expo since running out the clock was a big strategy for this card but finally challenge matches and ladder matches were a little more even so Expo wouldn't have this stupid advantage in one mode and not the other in August we would see a huge Tesla Nerf increasing its hit speed by 0.1 seconds and decreasing its lifetime by 5 Seconds which made the Tesla a pretty weak card in September we would see a total rework to the Barbarian Barrel which reduced it to two Elixir and still allowed it to kill archers it got a further buff in October making it very meta this made our Archer is very weak during this era and the Barbarian Barrel placed on an expo was almost guaranteed damage that could not only basically take out an expo for two Elixir but also absorb the damage it deals while the Barbarian is taking it out this month would also see a royal giant damage increase of 60 percent which made the win condition competitively viable after years of being mediocre the Royal giant was already considered a decent counter to Expo but now with the extra damage it was even better considering all these changes Expo was in a pretty weak position overall several of the cards in this deck were significantly weaker than they were when Expo 2.9 was first created and now with Barbarian Barrel as a solid counter to Expo and especially archers and with it appearing in nearly half of all Grand challenge matches it was nearly impossible to win consistently with the Expo unless you were really good it still had a lot of potential and Expo 2.9 continued to see usage but the win rate was significantly lower than its peak in December of 2018 Tesla would get a slight first hit speed buff and the Barbarian Barrel would be nerfed to no longer allow it to kill archers but this did little to nothing thing to save the dying archetype it was still the number four most popular deck in December but still had a 46 win rate and only a seven percent draw rate the Expo itself though only had a use rate of 3 percent with a win rate in the low 40s it was an extremely Niche card that could only work if you played a very specific deck and knew exactly how to play it but even then some matchups were practically unwinnable Expo just wasn't worth it for most players why pick up a deck you have to be amazing at just to succeed when the same amount of effort into Royal giant Three Musketeers or Golem could get you much further Expo just wasn't fun or appealing it was a different style of play that required a lot of patience and a lot more effort not to mention Expo was one of the least versatile cards in the game Expo really wasn't even viable outside of 2.9 cycle or Ice Wizard rocket NATO I will mention there was one notable event in regards to the Expo that happened in early December with Expo 2.9 made it to 90 wins in the global tournament finishing in first place this was due to an accidental buff given to the archers on December 5th during the global tournament which gave them extra range it was reverted shortly after the global tournament was over but certainly was helpful to 2.9 players while it was active this was actually the first Global tournament ever and lots of people were hyped to watch Expo Thrive live thanks to the briefly overpowered archers overall though the environment was vastly different than it was in 2017 and the Expo hadn't been involved in a balance change since August 2017. icebo actually won the following Global tournament that same month with an astonishing 117 wins 25 higher than second place as we go into 2019 the environment for Expo would only get worse so the question was would supercell directly buff this controversial win condition or let it keep slipping out of relevance the expo's rates didn't really change for the first few months of 2019 but in March supercell would directly buff the Expo after over a year with no changes all it simply was was buffing its Health by four percent even though it was a relatively small buff and the card's rates were already low players were quite upset at this announcement it may not have been in the best position but it was really unfun to play against and was a car most people didn't mind being a little underpowered supercell has certainly kept many cards in competitively weak States in Clash royale's history due to their mechanics being unfun and frustrating to go against when strong but it looks like supercell wouldn't be doing that here this buff caused the expo's use and win rates to rise to more healthy raids ice was rocket NATO also became much more popular but this buff was likely in preparation for a new car that would be coming out the following month that would not be good for Expo players April 2019 would see the release of the earthquake a previously outruled card would make its way into the Clash Royale Arena and this card's specific function would be to counter buildings it did quadruple the amount of damage to buildings than it did to true this means it would take out more than half of the expo's HP for just three Elixir you could also damage the ground Tower with the Expo dealing as much damage as a minus one level Fireball would do earthquake wasn't too strong nor too weak upon release it was actually quite a balanced card luckily for Expo players the use rate was fairly low so it wasn't a huge worry for now and remember even at one quarter of its HP you can't really ignore an expo so it's not like earthquake was a hard counter a few months later would be another very good period for Expo in August 2019 the pekko's range would be doubled making it very strong now why would some random pack a buff be worth bringing up in an expo video well because the Pekka was So Meta controlling this season a lot of other archetypes simply weren't that viable however Expo cycle was probably the pekko's best counter so a rise in Pekka saw a correlative rise in Expo to deal with it a Nerf to the Barbarian Barrel also came this season which was very helpful for the Expo as well even Expo Elixir pump or pump bow was making a small comeback the following month in September even though the Pekka got nerved to the execution would go through some major changes making it very strong nonetheless Expo didn't suffer too much during this period either but it was interesting exactly how different the performance was depending on the section of the game you were in by around the end of September beginning of October it had a six percent use rate and a 50 win rate in Grand challenges pretty standard however in top ladder it had a nine percent use rate which isn't that much higher granted but the win rate was 49 and the draw rate was 12 in Grand challenges that draw rate was zero percent meaning that ladder had a much lower loss rate than Grand challenges it was significantly lower because at the end of September supercell implemented a tiebreaker feature but Exempted it from being applied to 1v1 ladder matches the Expo archetype was certainly the most affected by this tiebreaker change since writing out the clock wasn't enough to avoid a loss anymore this new system wouldn't be applied to ladder matches until November however in October the Elixir Golem would come out and Expo certainly suffered a lot during this era it had worse raids from when it had four percent less Health six months prior it did recover after a few Elixir Golem Nerfs back to a five percent use and 45 win rate by January but now that tiebreakers were officially applied to ladder some players initially expected this to hurt the Expo quite a bit but if anything it did the opposite this new rule rewarded EXO players to sit back defend and not have to worry about taking a tower making sure to consistently cycle spells and stay just a little bit ahead I can assure you though players were not happy about this new game rule and the playstyles that it allowed for it was definitely controversial and it was mainly due to the Expo in March 2020 the Expo would be given an indirect Nerf because now the earthquake would be given the ability to deal damage to the Tesla while it's underground this made little sense from a balancing perspective considering the earthquake was in a much healthier position stat wise than the Tesla and this change specifically was geared towards just this one card from a logical point of view though this did make sense so supercell went ahead and did it earthquake had been steadily rising in popularity for a while as a result of many different factors part of this demand for earthquake was due to the rise of the Barbarian Aryan Hut and bomb Tower in early 2020 and the demand would only rise when the Goblin hut got a massive buff in April causing it to be extremely overpowered the earthquake's use rates skyrocketed in April because of this and the Expo Saul correlated fall around this time you were beginning to see much more of the Ice Wizard tornado rocket variant though rocket cycling was a go-to strategy when dealing with a constant flow of earthquakes in May the earthquake got a slight rework which heavily favored the Expo because although now it would do 11 more damage to troops it would do about 17 percent less damage to buildings so even though this rework made the earthquake even stronger overall since it was now in about a quarter of all decks it was less effective against the Expo now tornado got a rework in May giving it much more pulling power and allowed it to deal damage to Towers only at the cost of its duration this rework did slightly hurt the card overall but certainly not with Expo and Ice Wizard tornado remained very popular there wasn't much development in Expo for the rest of 2020 but it was slowly creeping up more and more and by November had a seven percent use rate with a win rate of 52 percent these rates are actually quite average but it seems like the Expo was only getting stronger throughout the year you would see more and more complaints about the Expo calling for a Nerf this was a very controversial card as many players fought back against those who claimed it needed a Nerf I gotta say I've done research about many controversial cards and reading through some of these Expo discussion comments really make me a little Disturbed of how rude and aggressive some people can be some of these comments I'm not even going to show despite the pushback on those calling for Nerfs drew the community manager would essentially confirm an expo Nerf on Twitter responding to a comment pleading for a Nerf which basically led to a community Civil War in the comments but who knew what this Expo Nerf would be this upcoming Nerf would actually be the last change the Expo has ever received to this day people could complain all they wanted but the inevitable day was approaching so what would supercell do to the Expo after nearly two years without any changes a card that was statistically balanced but very controversial while it wasn't exactly a hard Earth but instead a rework it would get five different changes the first two changes was changing its first hit attack time and its hit speed from 0.25 seconds back to 0.3 seconds which is what it was before it bugged out back in 2017. I was never really sure what reducing the hit speed had to do with fixing that bug in the first place remember that initial hit speed buff came in a maintenance break not a set of balance changes that four percent Health buff from 2019 would also get reverted its lifetime would receive a change for the first time ever being reduced from 40 seconds to 30 seconds all of these Nerfs would be compensated by a damage buff of 30 percent so it did have a slightly higher DPS than before one big interaction difference that came out of this was now a good two shot skeletons instead of three this was supercell's reasoning for the change Expo has been one of the most polarizing cards ever we wanted to rework it to keep it a deadly threat but lessen its power as a defensive building now the expo's attack is more powerful than ever able to destroy enemies with fewer shots but as a trade-off the Expo is more fragile and does not stay on the arena for nearly as long a time I think this rework was certainly going in the right direction decreasing its defensive capability immensely it was hard to know at first if this was an overall buff or a nerve however after a few weeks it was apparent that this raywork made the card worse its use rate dropped and stayed at about two to three percent with a win rate hovering around the low 40s and it would stay this way for years it had a couple tiny upticks here and there but it was always dipping below average and most of the time was hardly being used by the end of 2022 it was dipping as low as one percent with very low win rates in February of this year Expo 2.9 had a slight comeback due to the massive archers buff but it quickly fell even before The Archers got inevitably nerfed Expo was certainly a viable card granted it was still very niche as it's pretty much always been but that effort that goes behind being able to play Expo properly just isn't worth it for most people especially as The Meta develops and new cards are added the Expo seemingly just gets more and more bad matchups the Expo isn't a fun card and it's just overall not very good right now nowadays the expo's rates are almost identical to what they were just a few weeks after its rework maintaining a two to three percent use rate with a win rate in the mid to low 40s gone unchanged for two and a half years as of this video spell cycling was also nerfed a ton over the years all spells used to do 40 of their damage to Crown Towers but nowadays Fireball only deals 30 rocket deals 25 and log only 20. you'll occasionally see discussions of the dying population of Expo players begging and pleading for above but they would always be ignored by Supercell who has shown no interest from what I could see in making any direct changes to the card in years most players do not want Expo to be buffed due to the frustration it will inevitably cause if it's good and people will often point to top players who are still succeeding with Expo to this very day to defend the notion that it doesn't need above there aren't many but certainly a few who can still make the card work it does have small upticks every so often but what is the future for Expo will supercell keep the card in a worse off position like several other cards in order to minimize frustration or will they take the chance on getting this car to a healthy spot again personally I think Expo is fine the way it is it's much less frustrating to go against than it used to be and I think it is the most unhealthy card for this game I think an Elixir Golem Elite Barbarian double spawner meta would be better than having another defensive Expo rocket cycle meta I know this is weird coming from someone who has advocated publicly for Witch and Wizard Buffs but I don't think I've ever had less fun in this game than during the days of the expo's peak it's one of those cards that's simply better off being borderline useless for the overall health of the game if supercell can keep the wizard and the Barbarian Hut weak on purpose they can surely do that with the Expo as well if supercell does decide to change this card in any way though I hope they will at least keep the lifetime the same because I think 40 seconds was way too long I sometimes wonder though if allowing the Expo to Target air again after all these years would fare better in the modern Clash climate although it was overpowered in 2016 it might be a bit more balanced now with cards like Lava Hound in the game as a proper air tank Seth who is the head of balancing even put out Tweet back in 2018 asking the same question I think it may potentially make it much better on defense but worse on offense which seems like the wrong direction it's probably a terrible idea but I know it's a thought many have had and certainly would be interesting to see in this day and age but let me know your thoughts about the Expo and how you would change it my bias may have come out there a little at the end even though I do mostly try to stay unbiased for these videos nevertheless thank you all for watching and have a good one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Gratz

Views: 869,777

Keywords: Clash, Royale, Clash Royale, History, Clash Royale History, History of, Xbow, Xbow History, Clash Royale Xbow, History of Xbow, Clash Royale's History of Xbow, Xbow Clash Royale History, Hate Xbow, Nerf Xbow, Buff Xbow

Id: ciDbPzZpBhs

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023