Santa's Surprise

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"Ask Santa for the best present there is: a hail of destruction raining down on your enemies!"

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• Summary
  • The Santa's Surprise Spell creates Santa dropping down explosive presents on a certain area. It essentially serves as a much more powerful Lightning Spell with a larger damage radius, but with much less precision.
  • This spell was introduced during the 2012 winter theme update. When you cast the 2012 version spell, Santa comes and drops bombs in the form of presents on the defending village for a total of 1,500 damage.
  • It returned for the time period around Christmas 2016, albeit with heavily reduced damage, and was the first of three "Clashmas" gifts, the second was the Freeze Trap and the third was the Ice Wizard. It was available from UTC 10:00 23/12/16 through UTC 10:00 6/1/17. It has since made an annual appearance every Christmas period.
  • If the Santa's Surprise is used in multiplayer mode, it will generate up to five gifts on the opponent's village. These gifts spawn in a similar way as the tombstones, but each one is worth 5000 Elixir instead of 20.

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• Offensive Strategy
  • Santa's Surprise functions in a nearly identical fashion to a weaker Lightning Spell.
  • Like the Lightning Spell, Santa's Surprise is most commonly used to eliminate problematic defenses. Two Santa's Surprise spells will take out a Mortar or a Wizard Tower, and three will take out an Air Defense.
  • The Lightning Spell is generally preferable over the Santa's Surprise spell, which deals less damage than the Lightning Spell and damages structures much slower.

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• History
  • This spell prompted Supercell to increase the hit points of the Clan Castle. Players were destroying the Clan Castle with this spell before it could deploy its troops.
  • The spell was available around Christmas 2012, but not on Christmas Day itself.
  • The 2012 version of Santa's Surprise took 1 day and 1 hour to make, which is 25 hours and Christmas is on December 25^th. It used to cost 25,000 Gold, like all spells used to.
  • There was a potential cheat to win with the 2012 version of Santa's Surprise. You could use 3 (1,500 x 3 = 4,500) Santa's Surprise spells to K.O. the opponent's Town Hall (at the time, a maxed Town Hall level 9 had 4,200 HP). If Gems were no object, it would be possible to gain significant amounts of Trophies quickly with this strategy (though it would take approximately 522 Gems to immediately brew all three spells each time, or US$4.10 per attack if bought in bulk, as a chest of gems used to cost $109.99).
  • Watch the Video of Santa's Surprise!
  • Many players had speculated that there would be a chance that Santa's Surprise will come again in December 2013. However, it was not made available in the December 2013 update, which instead implemented the Santa Strike trap.
  • After the 2012 version became unavailable to create, anyone who had created the spell but had not used it would still have it in their Spell Factory. There were continuing reports on the forums (as of May 2013) of people being attacked by Santa's Surprise.
    • The same holds for the 2016 version.
    • If a player has the 2012 version and did not use it at all, it was automatically nerfed to the 2016 version.
  • The spell was added back in 2017 to be available until January 3rd, 2018. It retained its statistics from the 2016 version.
  • The Santa's Surprise made another appearance starting 24/12/18, and was available up to 31/12/18. Due to the introduction of Town Hall 12 in June, and with the damage at maximum Town Hall level unchanged, the statistics for lower Town Hall levels were slightly nerfed as compared to 2017.
  • In 2019 it has been re-introduced and it will last from the 23 December until the 31 December

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• Trivia
  • Santa's Surprise can't be donated to Clan Castles, due to being temporary.
  • Like all other temporary troops and spells, the Santa's Surprise can't be upgraded in the Laboratory. To calculate the statistics (Health, DPS, etc.) of temporary troops and spells, two factors are considered: the Base Statistic (as seen in the game files) and Town Hall multiplier.
    Each Base Statistic is multiplied by a fixed multiplier for each Town Hall level; the multiplier follows a roughly linear scale. The multiplier is $\frac{30+\lfloor\frac{70(x-1)}{y-1}\rfloor}{100}$, where $x$ is the player's Town Hall level and $y$ is the highest Town Hall level at that time. Once the multiplier is applied, the statistic is rounded down to give the final statistic.
    Note that other stats, such as training cost and death damage (if applicable), are not multiplied by the multiplier.
  • Base stats: Total damage=900, damage each strike=180.
  • The Santa that appears upon using the 2016 version of the spell appears to resemble a Hog Rider. His "reindeer" resemble the Hogs that his brethren ride.
  • Clash of Clans official YouTube channel released a quick video in 2017 announcing the third release of the Santa's Surprise.

Radius	Random Radius	Number of Strikes	Time Between Strikes	Housing Space	Time to Brew	Spell Factory Level Required	Cost
1 tile	4 tiles	5	0.1s	2	6 minutes	1	13,000

Tier *	Total Damage	Damage per Strike	Town Hall Level
1	477	95.4	5
2	531	106.2	6
3	585	117	7
4	630	126	8
5	684	136.8	9
6	738	147.6	10
7	792	158.4	11
8	846	169.2	12
9	900	180	13

*Santa's Surprise does not have numeral levels shown in-game. The "tier" column is for purposes of clarity between different Town Hall levels, which have different statistics. Tier counts from the lowest usable level.