Elephant Rider: the Root Rider Valkyrie Hybrid

> Quick answer: The Elephant Rider is a temporary troop arriving with the Awesome Medal event on 12 August 2026, and it's a blend of the Root Rider and the Valkyrie. It walks through walls the way a Root Rider does and swings in an arc the way a Valkyrie does, which means it opens your funnel and clears the compartment behind it in one motion. Temporary means battle mode only, and it leaves when the event does at the end of the month.

There's also a mass Elephant Rider and Super Valkyrie day on 9 August, before the event proper, so you get to try it early. If you want a layout that doesn't fold to wall ignoring troops, the base library is the fastest place to start.

Take the two things that make each parent troop annoying and staple them together. That's the Elephant Rider.

From the Root Rider side it gets the wall problem, or rather it removes the wall problem. Walls stop being a routing tool against it. You don't get to funnel it where you want it, you don't get to buy time while it chews through a layer, and the compartment design that works against every other ground army stops applying.

From the Valkyrie side it gets the swing. Valkyries have never been about single target damage, they're about clearing everything packed into a small space at once. Pair that with a unit that's already standing inside your compartments rather than outside them and the maths gets ugly fast.

That combination is why I think this one is going to feel stronger than the average event troop. Most temporary troops are a gimmick you play with for a weekend. This one addresses the single biggest weakness of smash armies, which is the time they waste getting in.

Here's the part people will get wrong in the first week. If your troop ignores walls, your funnel work changes completely, and mostly it gets easier in a way that trips you up.

Normally you spend the opening of an attack shaping a path. You clear buildings on the flanks so your main army doesn't wander, you place wall breakers to open a specific compartment, and the walls themselves do half the steering for you. Take walls out of that equation and your army goes wherever the nearest building is, which is frequently not where you wanted it.

So the funnel still matters. It just becomes about buildings rather than walls. Clear the outside cleanly, then commit, and accept that once they're in they'll cut across compartments in a straight line instead of following your plan.

The flip side, and this is the fun part, is that centralised Town Halls get much less protective. A layout built on making an attacker grind through three wall layers to reach the core doesn't slow this troop at all. I've been rebuilding around that assumption and it's a genuinely different design problem.

The Elephant Rider runs with the Awesome Medal event, 12 August through 31 August. That's the window and there isn't a way to extend it.

Before that, on 9 August, there's a mass troop injection day where your army fills with Elephant Riders and Super Valkyries. Those events are always worth clearing your schedule for, because your army is handed to you rather than trained, and you can throw absurd compositions at bases you'd never normally hit. Given the Super Valkyries bring rage with them, that particular pairing should be silly.

Temporary also means battle mode only. You can't slot it into a war army, you can't build a strategy around it for CWL, and anything you learn about it stops being useful in September. That's worth saying plainly, because every event troop generates a wave of posts treating it as a permanent meta shift and it never is.

What it does do is show you what your base looks like against a wall ignoring smash army, which is information you keep long after the troop goes away.

One scheduling note that catches people out every event. Temporary troops occupy your army camps like anything else, so a full raid army of these takes the same space it always would. If you're mid upgrade on camps, you'll be fielding fewer than the videos show, and the attacks will look very different as a result. Don't judge the troop off a half sized army.

The medal event itself is worth clearing time for regardless. Card tokens and quest medals accumulate through it and spend in the trader shop, and the pace you earn them at is set by how many attacks you actually get through. Three weeks sounds generous right up until the last weekend arrives and you're short.

There's a pattern with troops built from two existing units, and it's worth understanding before you write this one off as event filler.

Defences are tuned against clean archetypes. A base that stops ground smash does it by making the approach expensive, and a base that stops fast wall ignoring units does it by putting damage on the direct path. Those are different layouts. When one troop does both jobs, it isn't facing a base designed for it, it's facing a base designed for one of its halves.

The Root Rider went through exactly this. It wasn't the raw numbers that made it a problem on release, it was that nobody's layout accounted for an army that didn't care about the walls those layouts were built around. It took weeks for base design to catch up, and by then the damage to everyone's war record was done.

The Elephant Rider only gets three weeks, so base design almost certainly won't catch up at all. That asymmetry is the entire reason to pay attention to it. You'll be attacking into layouts that were never built with it in mind, which is the closest thing to free stars this game hands out.

It cuts the other way too, though. Your base wasn't built for it either, and everyone in your push range gets the same troop on the same day.

Since it handles entry and compartment clearing by itself, spend your remaining slots on the things it can't do.

It has no answer for air defence, obviously, and it has no answer for a single high value target sitting behind a lot of hitpoints. So healers and a hero to soak are the natural companions. A queen walking alongside a group of these gets to skip her usual slow wall opening entirely, which is a meaningful tempo gain in a three minute attack.

Spell wise, rage over haste. The troop already moves through obstacles, so the thing you're short on is damage in the window before defences focus them down. Invisibility is worth a slot against the new crafted defenses too, since a hero walking with your riders is exactly what the Hero Hunter is waiting for. I ranked all three of those in the crafted defense comparison if you want to know which one is going to punish this army hardest.

Against a base with heavy splash in the core, spread your entry across two points rather than one. Valkyrie style damage wants your units alive and swinging, and a single clumped group walking into layered splash is how these attacks die.

Siege machines are the awkward slot. A wall wrecker exists to solve a problem this troop doesn't have, so it's close to wasted here. I'd take something that delivers clan castle troops safely and keeps working afterwards instead, because your castle defenders are the one part of a defending base this army genuinely struggles with. A big defensive castle sitting in the middle of your riders can stall the whole push while the clock runs.

Last thing on composition. Resist the urge to fill every camp with riders. Event troops feel free, so people mass them and then discover they've got no cleanup for the scattered buildings around the edge. Leave room for something cheap and fast to finish corners, or you'll end up watching a two star sit there while the timer runs out on a base you comfortably broke.

You'll be on the receiving end during the event too, so build for it.

Walls are not your tool here. Stop thinking of them as the answer and start thinking about spacing. Units that swing in an arc want targets packed together, so a base that spaces its defences out in the core gives up far less value per swing than one that clusters them neatly into a tight box.

Splash damage is the real counter, and specifically splash that's positioned where a wall ignoring unit will actually walk, which is a straight line toward your nearest buildings rather than the winding path your compartments imply. Trace that line on your own layout and put something unpleasant on it.

Traps do a lot of work in this scenario for the same reason. An attacker who can't be routed is an attacker whose route you can predict, and predictable paths are where giant bombs earn their keep. Supercell's August season notes have the full event calendar if you want to plan the rest of the month around it. If you get hit by something you can't identify, run the replay screenshot through Find My Base and pull up the exact layout to study where it broke.