Is Grinding Every Brawler in Brawl Stars Worth It?

Open your brawler list and scroll to the bottom. Somewhere down there sits a legendary you unlocked months ago, played four times, and abandoned at Power 5. It cost 3,800 credits, roughly eleven weeks of free-to-play income, and it has never won you a serious match.

Supercell shipped a dozen new brawlers in 2025 and has not slowed down in 2026. A consistent free player earns roughly enough credits in a year to unlock a dozen brawlers. Read that twice, because it is the whole game: the finish line moves at exactly your pace, forever.

That is the part missing from every YouTube thumbnail promising you can unlock every brawler for free. The roster is past 100 characters and grows every season, with Nori arriving in July as a Legendary and Wendy due in August. The real question is not how to unlock all the brawlers. It is whether you should try.

The Math Behind “Unlock Every Brawler” Does Not Work

Start with the income. The free Brawl Pass track pays up to 1,000 credits per season, and seasons now last roughly a month. Add Starr Drops, daily quests, and Trophy Road, and a committed f2p account lands near 1,500 credits a month. Call it 18,000 in a good year.

Now the expenses. An Epic costs 925 credits, a Mythic 1,900, a Legendary 3,800, and the Ultra Legendary tier 5,500. Recent releases lean toward the expensive end of that list. Price a year of new releases at that mix, and you spend almost everything you earn just staying current, while the rest of the roster sits where it was. You are not making progress. You are holding station.

Community estimates for a fresh f2p account to unlock every brawler in Brawl Stars keep landing around two to three years, and even that assumes Supercell stops shipping. They will not.

What Every Brawler in Brawl Stars Actually Costs

Starr Road prices are fixed, which makes the bill for a complete roster easy to read.

Wait times assume roughly 1,500 credits a month from the free pass, Starr Drops, quests, and Trophy Road.

Two things jump out at you from that table. Rare and Super Rare brawlers no longer cost credits at all because the June 2025 Trophy Road rework made trophy progression the only route to them. Any guide still telling you to unlock them via Brawler Boxes belongs in a museum: Brawler Boxes have been gone since 2022.

The unlock is also the cheap part. Getting one brawler match-ready costs 3,740 power points and roughly 12,700 coins after paying for two gadgets, two star powers, and a hypercharge. Credits buy you the character. Coins and power points buy you the brawler. A legendary parked at Power 1 is not an asset; it is decoration.

Brawl Stars Only Ever Asks You for Twelve Brawlers

Ranked is the mode that actually measures you, and it unlocks at 1,000 trophies with a power floor: nothing below Power 9 can be played, and from Mythic rank upward, the floor rises to Power 11. The roster requirement scales with your rank. Bronze through Gold ask for three eligible brawlers. Diamond asks for nine. Mythic and above ask for twelve at Power 11.

Twelve. That is the number the game itself cares about, not 106.

Pick those twelve for coverage, not for rarity: a thrower for walled Brawl Ball maps, a marksman for open Bounty layouts, a tank who can carry the ball, an assassin for Knockout, a support who heals, and a few flexible mid-range picks. Twelve maxed brawlers with hypercharges will beat sixty half-leveled ones every single time. Power level shows up in every trade you take. The roster size appears on your profile.

Starr Drops, the Brawl Pass, and Trophy Road Are Already Doing the Grind

The roster also fills itself if you simply play. Supercell publishes the odds on its support portal: every Starr Drop rolls 50% Rare, 28% Super Rare, 15% Epic, 5% Mythic, and 2% Legendary. That last 2% is where free brawlers, skins, and hypercharges live, and at roughly one Legendary per fifty drops, anyone clearing daily quests trips over a few every season.

Trophy Road hands out brawlers at milestones and now stretches to 100,000 trophies. The free Brawl Pass pays out credits every season, whether you spend a cent or not. None of this needs a spreadsheet or a lost weekend. It needs you to play the game modes you already enjoy, which was supposed to be the point.

The Smarter Path to a Complete Roster

Four rules, all about where your credits go.

Spend on brawlers you play, not on rarity. A 3,800-credit legendary brawler you find boring is worth less than a 925-credit epic you main. Rarity is a price tag, not a power rating.

Use the first-of-rarity discounts on purpose. Your first Epic is 25% cheaper, and your first Mythic and first Legendary are half price. That is close to 3,000 credits of one-time savings. Spend it on brawlers you have already tested, not on the best splash art.

Leave the newly released brawler alone for two weeks. The meta shifts under your feet. Supercell’s June 2026 release notes gave Jacky 200 extra health and cut 8-Bit’s hypercharge rate by 15%, and that was a quiet month. Day-one hype is a bad reason to spend a legendary brawler’s worth of credits.

Decide whether the runway is worth your time at all. Plenty of players do the two-year climb because the climb is the game. Others would rather play at the level they are already good at, and established accounts change hands on marketplaces like igitems, where the roster and the power levels arrive pre-built instead of being bought back one credit at a time.

Open the Starr Road tonight and count how many of your brawlers sit at Power 11 with a hypercharge attached. If that number is under twelve, the next brawler you unlock will not make you better at Brawl Stars. It will only make your collection bigger. A complete roster is a screenshot. Twelve brawlers you can genuinely play is a win rate.