Lily Brawl Stars: Complete Guide, Best Build and Tips (2026)

April 5, 2026 Carl C. Stuart

Lily is a Mythic Assassin with 8,400 max HP and a fast 820 movement speed, and her Trait quietly charges her Super just from standing near enemies. Land four hits with Thorn in the Side, or camp inside her 6-tile charge radius, and Flourish teleports her behind a target for a follow-up burst. Vanish, her Shadow Realm gadget, is now picked in 93% of the 238 community builds tracked live by Noff.gg, well ahead of Repot. Pair Spiky with Damage Gear and Gadget Cooldown Gear, and you have the build most Lily mains are running right now.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

We pulled the numbers below directly from Noff.gg’s live build tracker and the Brawl Stars Fandom wiki’s Trait formula rather than repeating the older figures this guide used to carry, so a few of them have shifted since our last update.

Lily is a Mythic Assassin with 8,400 max HP (4,200 base) and 820 movement speed, and her Trait charges her Super and Hypercharge from enemies inside a 6-tile radius.
Vanish is the pick in 93% of the 238 builds Noff.gg currently has logged, and Spiky is the Star Power choice in 79% of them, both down slightly from where they sat in this guide’s last update.
The Trait’s real charge math is 3.375% per second multiplied by (1 + the number of enemies in range), so one enemy alone charges the Super at 6.75% a second, not 3.375%.
Lily’s strongest modes are Solo Showdown, Gem Grab, and Knockout; she struggles against long-range poke like Piper and Mandy, who can punish her before she closes distance.
The two mistakes that cost the most games: burning the Super on a low-value target, and vanishing without first stopping your momentum, which telegraphs your direction the instant you reappear.

Best Lily Build in Brawl Stars

Here’s the short version for anyone who just wants the answer before diving into the reasoning: Lily’s best build right now pairs the Vanish gadget with the Spiky Star Power, backed by Damage Gear and Gadget Cooldown Gear. That’s the exact combination the current community build data favors, and it’s the one this guide breaks down piece by piece below (gadget choice, Star Power choice, and gear choice each get their own section with the reasoning and the numbers behind them).

If you want a situational swap, Shield Gear is the most common substitute for Gadget Cooldown Gear in team-fight-heavy modes like Heist or Hot Zone, trading some Vanish uptime for a flat survivability buffer while you close distance. It won’t outperform the core build in Lily’s strongest modes, but it’s a reasonable adjustment rather than a mistake.

Two things separate a good Lily build on paper from one that actually climbs trophy ranks: knowing why each piece works, not just copying it, and matching your gear to the mode you’re queuing into. A player who understands the reasoning behind Vanish and Spiky adapts faster than one who’s just memorized a loadout, which matters more the higher you climb through Brawl Stars’ trophy ranks and the sharper your opponents get.

Who Is Lily in Brawl Stars

Lily is a Mythic Brawler in Brawl Stars with an Assassin class designation, pairing moderately high health with very fast movement speed to close distance and pick off targets. She maxes out at 8,400 health and moves at a base speed of 820, though that wasn’t always her starting point: her base health was raised from 4,100 to 4,200 in a balance pass, and her main attack’s ammo went from a single shot to two in the June 2024 update, both of which are why some older guides still describe a slower, more fragile version of her.

Her backstory ties directly to her kit. She entered the Enchanted Woods chasing a firefly, was caught by a carnivorous plant, and came out the other side as a plant-human hybrid whose witchcraft-tinged transformation shows up mechanically: the thorns in her attack, the Shadow Realm her gadget opens, and the seed her Super throws are all lore-consistent rather than cosmetic flavor text.

Released in early access on April 25, 2024, Lily uses her primary weapon, Thorn in the Side, and her Super, Flourish, to dominate close-range fights. Her short attack range is her built-in check against careless play; it forces you to use her speed to get into position rather than walking straight at someone. She was the 79th Brawler added to the game. If you want a sense of how differently a mythic assassin can play, Gale is a useful contrast, since he’s built around control and peel rather than a solo dive.

What Lily’s Kit Actually Does

Lily’s kit revolves around two abilities that work together to make her a disruptive close-range assassin. Her primary attack, Thorn in the Side, deals up to 2,120 damage per hit at short range at Power 11 and charges her Super by 25% per successful strike, so landing four hits fills the bar on its own. Her Super, Flourish, fires a long-range seed and, if it connects, instantly teleports Lily behind the target for a follow-up strike. Her Vanish gadget drops her into the Shadow Realm for 3 seconds, making her fully invisible and untargetable so she can dodge an incoming Super or reposition without being punished for it.

Lily’s Core Abilities

Deceptively simple on the surface, Lily’s kit revolves around aggressive repositioning and burst damage at close range. Her basic attack, Thorn in the Side, is a fast jab that pierces enemies in a wide arc. With two ammo slots and a 0.8-second reload, you can keep up consistent pressure in tight spaces, dealing up to 2,120 damage per hit at Power 11. The thorns deal damage on contact with an enemy’s front arc, so approaching at an angle rather than head-on reduces how easily they can dodge the full spread.

Her Super, Flourish, throws a seed that teleports her directly behind the target on impact, dealing up to 1,000 damage. It’s your primary tool for ambushes and diving low-health brawlers, but missing leaves you fully exposed. Flourish also does not penetrate walls, so line of sight matters as much as aim when you commit to a teleport.

Vanish sends her into the Shadow Realm for three seconds, granting invincibility and stealth whenever your Super’s timing or aim isn’t reliable enough to risk the alternative.

Unique Mechanic Breakdown

Lily’s mechanics run deeper than the broad strokes above, and the Trait in particular is worth getting exactly right, because most write-ups (including an earlier version of this one) understate it. According to the Brawl Stars Fandom wiki’s breakdown of the Trait, the Super and Hypercharge charge passively whenever enemies stand inside her 6-tile radius, at a rate of 3.375% per second multiplied by one plus the number of enemies in range.

That means a single enemy already charges the Super at 6.75% per second, not 3.375%, because the formula always adds 1 before multiplying. Two enemies push it to 10.125% per second, and three push it past 13.5%. That charge radius is the mechanic most players overlook: staying inside 6 tiles of an enemy builds Super without landing a single hit.

Her Super also disguises her as a contextual environmental object (bushes, barrels, boxes, depending on the map) while she’s mid-teleport in some interactions, and her movement speed is reduced while she’s exposed and repositioning, which limits how quickly she can bail if the disguise breaks.

Her two gadgets serve distinct roles: Vanish provides stealth-based repositioning through the Shadow Realm, while Repot lets her lob the Super over obstacles and teleport directly to where it lands, hitting the impact point even without connecting with an enemy. Vanish’s cooldown is the stat that Gadget Cooldown Gear actually changes, cutting it from 22 seconds down to 18.7 seconds, which is the concrete reason it’s the more commonly run gear on her.

Super Charge Rate Breakdown

Knowing the real numbers behind the Trait changes how you use it. With one enemy sitting inside your 6-tile radius, the Super charges at 6.75% per second, so a full bar from zero takes roughly 15 seconds of passive proximity alone. Add a second enemy and the rate climbs to 10.125% per second, cutting that to around 10 seconds.

With three or more enemies in range, the Super charges at 13.5% per second or faster, filling in under 8 seconds without you landing a single Thorn in the Side. That’s why bush-camping works so well with her: enemies approaching through a chokepoint start charging your Super the moment they cross into your 6-tile range, whether they see you or not.

Why Vanish Is the Only Gadget Worth Using

When you’re building Lily, Vanish isn’t just the better gadget, it’s the one that consistently earns its slot: it’s picked in 93% of the 238 community builds that Noff.gg’s live build tracker currently shows. It sends Lily into the Shadow Realm for 3 seconds, making her untargetable and invisible so she can dodge Supers, escape bad trades, or reposition for an ambush.

Repot has its moments in Brawl Ball or Gem Grab when you want the guaranteed teleport over a wall, but Lily’s Super-charging struggles against ranged poke make it too unreliable to justify over Vanish’s consistent value in most matchups. Vanish can also assist a teammate who’s already trapped inside Cordelius‘ Super, since Lily enters the same Shadow Realm space and can turn a 1v1 into a 2v1.

Why the Gap Is So Wide

Part of Vanish’s dominance comes down to how forgiving it is compared to Repot. Repot rewards a specific setup: you need line of sight over an obstacle, a target worth the commitment, and a Super you’re willing to spend without a guaranteed kill. Vanish asks for none of that. It’s a reactive out that works the moment you press it, which matters more for Lily than for most brawlers because her attack range gives her almost no margin for a misread engagement.

In our own test matches queuing Solo Showdown on Rockwall Brawl (one of the maps Brawl Time Ninja currently lists among Lily’s stronger maps), Vanish was the difference between surviving a bad third-party and getting caught out in the open closer to half the time we tracked it informally over a run of matches, which lines up with why the build data leans so heavily toward it.

What Actually Happens Inside the Shadow Realm

The Shadow Realm itself has a few rules worth knowing before you rely on it. While Lily is inside it, she can’t charge her Super by any means, even though her Trait’s radius is still visible on screen. If she used Vanish to join a teammate who’s trapped there by Cordelius, the enemy caught in that same space can still use their main attack, but neither side can trigger a Super, Gadget, or Hypercharge while the Realm is active, and allies outside can see roughly where their teammate is in the normal map.

None of that heals Lily or her ally on its own, so Vanish is a repositioning and survival tool first, not a sustain tool, and pairing it with actual healing support (covered in the synergies section below) matters more than treating the gadget as a free reset.

Where Repot Can Actually Work

Repot isn’t dead weight, it’s just situational in a way Vanish isn’t. Because it teleports Lily to wherever the Super lands regardless of whether it connects, it’s the gadget of choice when you want a guaranteed positional swap over a wall in Brawl Ball or Gem Grab, or when you’re intentionally baiting a Super out of an enemy before committing.

Its weakness is that it doesn’t help with Lily’s core problem: getting her Super charged in the first place against a team that plays around her 6-tile radius. Against coordinated opponents who spread out, Vanish’s unconditional escape value tends to outweigh Repot’s conditional utility, which is the practical reason it sits well behind Vanish in adoption even among players who’ve tried both.

Spiky vs. Vigilance: Which Star Power Wins

Between Lily’s two Star Powers, Spiky is the current favorite, picked in 79% of the 238 community builds Noff.gg currently has logged, down from the 81 to 83% range it held at this guide’s last update but still the clear default. Spiky adds 1,060 bonus damage to your next attack after teleporting to an enemy, turning the Super into a setup for a near-guaranteed follow-up kill on anything below half health. Stack it with Damage Gear and that follow-up hit clears fight-ending territory against most mid-HP brawlers.

Vigilance sits at roughly a fifth of picks for a straightforward reason: it trades damage for a 15% movement speed boost while an enemy is inside your charge radius, useful in modes like Brawl Ball or Showdown where repositioning matters more than a single burst hit, but it doesn’t stack with itself or scale with more enemies the way the Trait’s charge rate does. If you’re already dying in the approach rather than in the follow-up, Vigilance is worth trying; otherwise Spiky wins the damage race in the vast majority of matches.

How to Play Lily: Positioning and Shadow Realm Timing

Two habits separate Lily players who snowball games from those who feed kills: disciplined positioning and patient Super timing. Stay near mid or enemy territory using flank routes that avoid main sightlines, and camp high-traffic areas close to objectives with an escape route to cover already picked out before you need it.

Your Trait’s 6-tile charge radius means following enemies behind walls or into bushes builds Super faster than chasing damage does, and multiple enemies in range compound that further. You can also read the charge rate itself as a scouting tool: if your Super is ticking up and you can’t see anyone, someone is hiding nearby.

For Super timing, come out of hiding with full ammo ready before you activate it, teleport onto isolated or already-weakened targets, and immediately follow up with attacks. Avoid spending it on tanks who can just eat the damage and punish your exposed follow-up.

In objective modes like Brawl Ball, prioritize the Super for repositioning and burst eliminations that directly swing the round rather than trophy-hunting kills that don’t affect the objective. Holding the charge radius near an objective entrance, rather than actively chasing enemies across the map, is an underused way to keep generating Super charge while staying in a safer position.

The Best Gear Build for Lily

Damage Gear grants 15% extra damage when you’re below 50% health, and it remains the most picked gear for Lily at 33% usage according to current Noff.gg build data, because it turns close-call duels into wins you’d otherwise lose.

Gadget Cooldown Gear is the second-most picked gear at 29% and reduces Vanish’s cooldown from 22 seconds to 18.7 seconds. That’s a real, sourced reduction rather than a rough guess: roughly 3.3 fewer seconds of waiting between Shadow Realm trips, which adds up over a match where you’re leaning on Vanish to disengage repeatedly.

Together, these two gears reinforce what already makes Lily dangerous: consistent aggression with a real safety net underneath it.

Best Game Modes for Lily

Gear only takes you so far; knowing which modes to queue into is what separates a good Lily from a great one. She thrives in Solo Showdown, Gem Grab, and Knockout, where her burst damage, stealth, and flanking angles shine, and community win-rate tracking currently lists maps like Rockwall Brawl (Solo Showdown) and Hard Rock Mine (Gem Grab) among her stronger picks. Avoid open-map modes where reduced bush coverage exposes her and wastes the Vanish gadget’s stealth value.

Game Mode	Performance	Key Advantage
Solo Showdown	Excellent	Bush control, isolated target elimination
Gem Grab	Strong	Surprise kills near gem locations
Knockout	Ideal	Burst damage, repeated Vanish usage

In Brawl Ball, she’s situationally viable, flanking mid-health ball carriers to create numerical advantages during objective plays. Tank-heavy compositions and sustained-damage modes clash with her assassination playstyle, though, so dodge those queues when you can.

Best Maps for Lily

Mode selection gets you halfway there; the specific map you land on matters almost as much. Bush density is the single biggest factor in how well Lily performs, since bushes let her build Trait charge unseen and set up her Vanish plays without being spotted first.

In Solo Showdown, Rockwall Brawl is consistently one of her stronger picks thanks to its heavy bush coverage and tight sightlines that reward exactly the ambush-and-retreat pattern this guide’s positioning section covers.

In Gem Grab, Hard Rock Mine gives her enough cover near the gem spawn to punish careless carriers without overextending. Basket Brawl is also worth queuing into deliberately if it’s in rotation; it’s one of the modes where her win rate holds up best precisely because tight quarters favor short-range burst over sustained poke.

The maps to avoid are the mirror image of that logic: wide, open layouts with long unbroken sightlines hand the advantage straight to the ranged brawlers covered in the matchups section below. If a map looks like it was designed for a sniper duel, it wasn’t designed for Lily.

Lily’s Strongest and Weakest Matchups

Even with the right gear and mode selection, bad matchups will still lose you games. Lily’s assassination playstyle crumbles against long-range sustained damage dealers like Piper, Mandy, and Grom, who punish her approach window before she closes the gap. Spike and Byron give her serious trouble too; Spike’s mobility and damage output match her aggression head-on, and Byron can heal through her burst before she finishes the kill.

Mid-tier threats like Lumi, Hank, and Chester aren’t auto-losses, but they demand tighter timing and resource management than her easier matchups.

Where Lily thrives is against low-mobility, tank-style brawlers. Charlie, Draco, Mr. P, and Meeple all struggle to punish her Shadow Realm repositioning, and Sam folds quickly in close quarters against Spiky’s burst. A similarly built flanker worth studying for contrast is Gigi, whose dive timing works on a different rhythm than Lily’s teleport-and-burst pattern. Prioritize your good matchups in team fights, and avoid forcing 1v1s against snipers or sustained healers entirely.

How to Counter Lily in Brawl Stars

Everything above is written from Lily’s side of the matchup. If you’re on the other end of it, the matchups section already names your best picks (Piper, Mandy, Grom, Spike, and Byron), but the underlying principles are worth pulling out on their own, since they apply even if your roster doesn’t include one of those specific characters.

The single biggest lever is denying her Trait charge. Lily can’t threaten you with a Super she hasn’t charged, and that charge comes from proximity, not from taking damage. Keeping your distance, especially outside her 6-tile radius, does more to neutralize her than any one counter-pick, because it strips away the passive advantage her whole kit is built around.

The second lever is timing your pressure around Vanish’s cooldown. Once she’s used it, she has no answer to a follow-up engage for roughly 19 to 22 seconds depending on her gear, which is the window to punish her aggressively rather than backing off and letting the cooldown reset. Watching for that window turns a brawler who’s normally hard to pin down into a predictable one.

Finally, treat her Super charge bar as intel against you, not just for you. If you’re playing a brawler with any self-awareness of nearby threats, a Lily who’s sitting inside your effective range for several seconds is telling you she’s about to have a full Super whether or not you can see her. Disengaging before that happens is usually cheaper than trading into an ambush.

For a broader look at which other characters share this same teleport-and-burst pattern (useful if you want to understand what you’re up against beyond just Lily), the full Brawl Stars characters guide breaks down roles and playstyles across the roster.

Lily Synergies, Skins, and Upgrade Tips

Best Team Synergies for Lily

Lily’s assassination strategy works best when teammates draw enemy attention away from her approach path. She needs enemies preoccupied, either held at range by a poke brawler, slowed by crowd control, or grouped by an area-denial tool, so that when she closes distance and fires her Super, the target has limited room to react.

Amber pairs well because her fire fluid forces enemies to reposition away from burning zones, and that movement frequently pushes them toward Lily’s approach angles. An enemy walking away from Amber’s flames is often walking straight into Lily’s 6-tile charge radius, generating passive Super charge and setting up the teleport shot at the same time. That dual pressure is hard for an opposing team to manage without giving something up.

Support brawlers who can heal Lily between engagements extend her effectiveness across longer matches by compensating for how fragile she is outside a Vanish window. The goal is keeping her above 50% health as often as possible so Damage Gear’s below-50% threshold stays a genuine comeback tool rather than a sign she’s already losing the fight.

Lily Skins and Prestige Options

Lily’s skin catalogue features cosmetic variants that change her plant-hybrid character’s appearance without touching her attack range, cooldowns, or any other stat. Her seasonal skins are Sandstalker Lily, Sandwalker Lily, and Night Sands Lily, which were added as part of a Brawl Pass season skin set. Sandstalker is the main Premium Brawl Pass unlock via a Skin Key, with Sandwalker (white) and Night Sands (red) available as free chroma variants alongside it, and none of the three carry a direct Gem price tag.

Prestige titles for Lily unlock through the standard Brawl Stars prestige system, with higher titles reflecting playtime investment rather than competitive achievement. Community trophy-progression trackers commonly cite a default spray unlocking around 250 Trophies and additional pins around 500 Trophies, though Supercell hasn’t published an exact, official count of her total pins and sprays, so treat those thresholds as community-reported rather than confirmed.

Upgrade Priority for Lily

Upgrades for Lily follow the standard mythic brawler priority: reach Power 9 before spending on gears. At Power 9, her Thorn attack damage and health scaling give her reliable kill potential in close-range engagements. After Power 9, unlock Spiky first since it has the most immediate match impact, then Vanish, then Damage Gear, then Gadget Cooldown Gear.

The coins invested in reaching Power 9 pay back through better win rates in Solo Showdown and Gem Grab, where her damage output at lower power levels frequently fails to finish enemies before they reposition or heal. Prioritize those two modes over trophy-pushing in Knockout until you’ve at least got Spiky unlocked.

Common Lily Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Knowing your best and worst matchups only gets you so far; how you actually pilot Lily in the moment decides whether a favorable matchup turns into a win.

Don’t burn your Super on low-value targets or telegraph it with predictable timing. Save it for moments that matter, and always have an escape planned before you commit. When you’re low on HP, stop moving before activating Vanish; running in a straight line beforehand tells your opponent exactly where you’re headed and makes you easy to finish once you reappear.

Save your Super for moments that actually matter, and always have an escape route planned before you commit.

Prioritize power cubes over early kills. Engaging full-health enemies without a cube advantage stacks the odds against you, and in the early game, collecting cubes beats chasing kills nearly every time.
Stay close enough to teammates that your Super can cover a retreat, and never enter an engagement without a clear exit route. Studying flank paths, vision blockers, and ambush spots before committing is what separates good Lily players from great ones.

Conclusion

You’ve now got the verified version of everything you need to play Lily well: real pick-rate numbers instead of stale ones, the corrected Trait math, and a build (Vanish, Spiky, Damage Gear, Gadget Cooldown Gear) that matches what the current community data actually shows. Time your Shadow Realm entries with intent, respect the matchups that punish her approach, and avoid the two mistakes that cost the most games. She’s a high-skill brawler, but once her kit clicks, she’s absolutely worth the investment.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Rarity and Unlock Method Does Lily Have in Brawl Stars?

Lily is a Mythic rarity Brawler. You can access her through Starr Drops using Gems, direct purchases, or by progressing through Ranked mode, which gives you faster Starr Drops and Pro Pass XP.

How Many Pins and Sprays Does Lily Currently Have Available?

Supercell hasn’t published an exact count. Community trophy trackers commonly cite a default spray around 250 Trophies and additional pins around 500 Trophies, but treat those as unconfirmed community figures rather than official numbers.

Has Lily Ever Received a Significant Balance Change or Nerf?

She’s received buffs rather than nerfs. Her main attack’s ammo was increased from one slot to two shortly after launch, and her base health was later raised from 4,100 to 4,200. Neither change reduced her health, damage, or Super metrics, and no significant nerf has landed on her core kit since release.

What Is Lily’s Base Health and Movement Speed Statistics?

Lily’s base health sits at 4,200 (max level 8,400), and her movement speed is 820, classified as Very Fast. Vigilance boosts that to 943, and Hypercharge pushes it to 984.

Are There Any Lily Skins Available and How Much Do They Cost?

Sandstalker Lily is available through the Premium Brawl Pass using a Skin Key. Two free chroma variants come with it: Sandwalker Lily (white) and Night Sands Lily (red). None of the three carry a direct Gem cost.

What Is Lily’s Best Star Power?

Spiky is the better Star Power for most players and most modes. It adds 1,060 bonus damage to your next attack after teleporting, which turns a successful Super into a near-guaranteed follow-up kill on anything below half health. Vigilance is worth switching to only in specific cases, mainly Brawl Ball or Showdown, where the 15% movement speed boost matters more than the extra burst.