[GUIDE] The Ultimate Goblin Knife Guide

Hey everyone!

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I usually do guides for th13 attacks, but wanted to make one for a personal favorite attack strategy of mine: the Goblin Knife. There are already plenty of guides out there for it, but hopefully this one can be refreshing, in-depth, and helpful for all of you farming for Dark Elixir.

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tldr: [https://youtu.be/Hv02jlY9JBE](https://youtu.be/Hv02jlY9JBE)

# What is Goblin Knife?

Goblin Knife is an attack strategy that costs ZERO dark elixir, and is the most effective way of quickly and easily farming for Dark Elixir. This strategy is best used at th9 and th10, where you’re grinding at least 70 levels of heroes that all require dark elixir. While you can use fat war armies to triple bases and get lots of DE, the advantages of goblin knife are:

1. Relatively quick train time (when compared to a 3-star army)
2. No Dark Elixir Cost
3. HEROES AND CC TROOPS ARE OPTIONAL

That’s right, you don’t need heroes or even a clan castle to use the Goblin Knife. That way you can be upgrading your heroes and still attack. If you’re boosting and have a cooldown on your clan castle request, you can alternate between attacking with and without cc troops. This strategy is efficient, versatile, and EASY.

*The idea is simple: Drop Giants (and heroes/cc if available) to tank, use wizards behind to clear outside collectors, then use wallbreakers and jumps to access the core of the base. From there you drop all your goblins in a straight line to the core, where they’ll attack storages and the townhall under rage*

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**Composition:**

This will depend on your taste. At th9, my composition is as follows:

20 Giants

12 Wizards

5 WallBreakers

62 Goblins

2 Rage, 2 Jump, 1 Freeze

CC: Pekka, Giant, Poison

The only changes I make at townhall 10 are the addition of a heal spell and the log launcher for the siege machine. You can have more giants/wizards and less goblins, or go to as many as 80 goblins; that’s all up to you!

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# The Strategy

The strategy for Goblin Knife is simple. First you pick your base, and depending on the base you choose, you’ll attack it differently.

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**Choosing a Base:**

You’ll want to go through a few steps as you choose a base to farm. The first step being your “loot threshold”. As you go into an attack, you should have a number in mind that you want to get (i.e. 2000 DE, or 1,500 DE AND 300,000 Elixir, etc), and hit skip until you find a base with those numbers. Once you do, you want to identify what kind of base it is. It could be:

1. Dead Base (all loot in the outside Collectors)
2. Dark Elixir Base (Full DE Storage, not much loot elsewhere)
3. Full Base (Collectors and storages of all types are full)

The Goblin Knife is BEST against the second base, to snipe storages, but it can be used with the other bases as well .

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**Dead Bases:**

You can farm these easily with the Goblin Knife troops, but you won’t really be doing a Goblin Knife. Place a couple giants in front of the collectors, with goblins behind to snipe them. You can be precise with this and get all the collectors. If there are some collectors behind walls, put a couple more giants down and use the wizards to grab those.

It’s important with dead bases to avoid using your SPELLS, as well as avoiding your heroes and cc troops. You won’t need them, and you’ll be ready to farm immediately afterwards if you preserve them. The Spells are also the majority of the elixir cost, so saving them will go a long way in resource management. Goblin Knife is all about spamming over and over, so when you can get away with using less, it’s important that you do.

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**Active Bases:**

THIS IS THE TRUE GOBLIN KNIFE. Here are the steps to it:

1. Locate Dark Elixir Drills and Storage
2. If possible, snipe the Drills with 1-2 giants and 4-5 goblins
3. Drop giants on the outside the of the base closest to the dark elixir storage. Wallbreak the first layer if possible.
4. Drop wizards behind in a large fan, saving 2-3 wizards for cleanup. The wizards are there to funnel your heroes and cc troops inside the base, as well as to destroy any collectors on the outside that could distract your goblins.
5. Drop Heroes and CC troops behind the giants (this step is optional if you have no clan, or heroes are upgrading)
6. Rage the army, and use a jump (or two if necessary) to access the Dark Elixir Storage & townhall compartments.
7. Drop all of you goblins! Use two fingers so they deploy quickly, and make sure that they’re targeting something inside the base. If they’re wanting to go outside, drop a dozen or so in a large fan to quickly clean up outside collectors, then drop the rest to go inside.
8. 2nd Rage over the core so the goblins get the storage and townhall
9. (Optional) If you still have another Jump spell, use it for your giants/heroes/pekka as they progress through the base
10. Use Cleanup troops as necessary; wait until defenses are targeting your tanks before you drop your cleanup wizards on the outside.

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**Full Bases**

The difference between a Full Base and an active one is that a full base will have plenty of loot in the collectors, and you may also want to get Gold and Elixir storages as well. The goblin knife isn’t designed to triple, so you may not get all the loot, but with one quick edit to the attack you’ll get most of it!

For full bases, you’ll really want your heroes and cc troops if possible. *The best way to get as much loot as possible is to do the goblin knife on two separate sections of the base.* This means dropping 10 giants, 5-6 wizards to funnel, and your heroes into one high-loot compartment, and the rest of the giants, wizards, and your cc troops on another area of the base. Use one jump and one range on each section, and drop all your goblins at the same time. The goal is that the goblins will converge in the middle and still get value from the middle, while taking out substantially more on the way in.

*Note: Because you’ll be splitting your army up and dividing your goblins, they won’t cut as deep as normal. Don’t expect them to go deeper than 1-2 compartments, whereas in a normal goblin knife they can get as far as 5 compartments in with properly places wallbreaks/jumps.*

# Higher Townhalls

The main idea of goblin knife stays the same at higher townhalls. With siege machines you can get creative, but the best uses I see are the wall wrecker or log launcher. Both go deep into the base and take out storages on their way in, while also guaranteeing the townhall. You can either use it *with* your push, or to cover another side of the base (like the description for Full Bases). It’s also important to take a heal at th10 in case you have to try and work through an inferno tower.

At th11 or higher the game changes with super troops and the warden ability, so you can still try goblin knifing, but there will be more fun and creative alternatives. Just be mindful of the increased splash damage and take freezes/heals/or your warden ability to work around multi-infernos or Eagle shots. Because splash damage is so tough on goblins, the strategy really works best at th9 or fresh th10 without infernos.

# That’s all! Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about the Goblin Knife!