League medals: how the maths works and what to buy

Three different things in this game get called medals, they come from three different places, and none of them buys anything the others buy. That is the reason most searches about medals go nowhere.

• League medals come from Clan War League and spend in the League Shop on hammers, potions and resources.
• Raid medals come from raid weekends in the Clan Capital and spend in the Trader.
• Event medals are whatever the event running this month calls them, and they stop existing when it ends.

This page is about league medals. The other two are answered at the bottom, because the searches that bring people here are usually one of the three and rarely the one people expect.

Where league medals come from

Clan War League runs once a month: a preparation day, then seven wars on seven days, one attack per player per war. There are 22 rungs, from Bronze III at the bottom to Legend at the top.

If you last paid attention before the May 2026 season, the ladder is longer than you remember. Four rungs were added above Champion I: Titan III, Titan II, Titan I, and then Legend, which is a single tier rather than a set of three. Titan II and above also run battle modifiers, the same handicaps Legend League uses, so attacks up there are deliberately harder. Rewards across the older leagues were rebalanced at the same time, which is why a clan that has been in the same league for years may have seen its medal count move.

Two things set the size of the pot before you have done anything at all. Which league your clan is in, and where it finishes out of the eight clans in the group. Both matter, and the league matters far more.

The spread is wider than most people assume. A player who caps out in a Legend clan that finishes first is looking at around 508 medals for the season. The same finish, by the same player, in Bronze III is worth about 34. That is roughly fifteen times, and it is the strongest argument there is for a clan pushing its league even in the seasons where it feels like a grind.

Eight stars, and then nothing

This is the part worth knowing, and almost nobody does.

Your personal share is not proportional to your stars. It works like this:

• Being on the roster at all is worth 20 percent of the medals available to you.
• Every star you score adds 10 percent.
• It stops at eight stars.

Seven wars, one attack each, so the maximum available to you is 21 stars and you need eight of them. That is an average of a little over one star an attack. You can two star every war and cap out on the fourth day. You can miss two attacks entirely and still finish on 100 percent.

The corollary is the uncomfortable one: once you are past eight, more stars earn you no more medals. They still decide where the clan places, which resizes everyone's pot, and they still decide whether the clan wins wars, which is where the bonus medals come from. So the stars are not wasted. They just stop paying you directly, and anyone attacking hard on day seven purely for their own medal count has already been paid.

Bonus medals, and the deadline that quietly wastes them

Bonus medals are a completely separate pool sitting on top of everything above, and they are the only part of CWL rewards that a human decides.

• The clan starts the season with a set number of bonuses to give out, more of them in higher leagues: four in Champion I, five anywhere in Titan, six in Legend.
• Every war the clan wins adds one more. Seven wins is seven extra bonuses to hand out.
• What one is worth also scales with league, from roughly 35 medals near the bottom to around 105 in Legend.
• The leader or a co-leader picks who gets them. Anyone on the roster is eligible, including someone who never attacked, and including someone who has already left the clan.

Then there is the rule that costs clans real medals every month:

Because it is discretionary, the bonus is the one CWL reward that can make people feel cheated, and it is worth handling exactly the way the roster is handled: say how bonuses are allocated before the season starts, not after the wars are over. Attendance, stars scored, or a rotation are all defensible. Nothing announced afterwards is, even when it was fair, because from the outside it is indistinguishable from favouritism.

If you are picking on attendance, you need the attendance, which is the same record that missed attacks show up in.

What to actually buy

Prices are fixed and the shop does not rotate.

Statues, hero skins and a war scenery are also in there, from 100 medals for the cheapest statue up to 2,400 for the scenery. They are cosmetic and they are priced like it.

Hammers are the headline and they are a once a month decision. A good season is roughly one hammer, so treat it as a monthly choice rather than a purchase. A hammer starts and finishes an upgrade outright, resource cost included, which means its value is decided entirely by what you point it at. Point it at the longest single thing you have available. For most accounts working through the upgrade order that is a hero or the Town Hall itself, and spending 120 medals to skip a four day building throws most of the value away.

Builder potions are the best value in the shop when every builder is busy. Thirty medals buys roughly nine hours of extra progress per builder, so with six builders working it is over fifty builder hours for a quarter of a hammer's price. With two idle builders it is a waste. The item is fine, the timing is everything.

Resources are a last resort. Two and a half million gold for 25 medals is not a bad rate, but you can farm gold and you cannot farm medals, so buying resources converts the rarer currency into the common one. It only makes sense when you are short by exactly the amount that unblocks something today.

Raid medals and event medals

Raid medals come from raid weekends, they spend in the Trader, and they are the one thing that crosses from the Clan Capital back to your home village. They are not interchangeable with league medals in either direction. That side is covered on the Clan Capital page.

Metal medals were an event currency, and the honest answer to how to get them is that you cannot. They belonged to the Sound of Clash event, which ran from 8 to 29 April 2026, and the Trader's event tab for it closed on 1 May. There is no way back to them and no way to buy them.

The pattern is worth knowing, because the question returns with a new name every few months. Each medal event mints its own currency, Metal Medals and Magic Medals and Dragon Medals before them, earned along an event track while the event is live, spent in the Trader's event tab, and gone shortly after the event ends. You cannot bank them, you cannot carry them into the next event, and there is no free source outside the event itself. If an event is running, spend down to zero before it closes.

League medals are the opposite, and that is the useful contrast: they never expire, so saving three seasons for something worth having is a real strategy rather than a risk.