So along with this Cinderace raid, we also have two other mons in the event. And the one that has been giving me fits is Gengar. I’ve been talking about it on the Discord channel, and everyone there is pretty familiar with how tough Gengar is in general as a raid boss. And this event Gengar is no exception.
I tried using some standard mons to solo the 5* Gengar raid, and if I got lucky I was successful sometimes. The only relatively reliable standard raid mon that I found was Tinkaton. Her Own Tempo ability and Steel typing eliminate the Confuse Ray, Clear Smog, and poisoning issues that plagues most standard raid mons. As long as Gengar didn’t get too lucky with Shadow Ball, special defense drops, paralysis, or crits, or spam too many Night Shades — then Tink could usually power through. But that’s too many ifs for me to feel good about Tink as a true go-to mon for Gengar raids. And although Tink is decent, Tink is just a really solid raid mon overall, so even if I win, it’s not really solving the troublesome raid. It’s like using Hands for most raids - it’s such a good mon, that you don’t really need to think about the raid, you just do the Hands thing, and keep at it until you win it. I was hoping to find something that really fit this raid against the grinning evil poltergeist.
The next standard raid mon I had some limited success against Gengar with was Maushold. Maushold isn’t really a “standard” raid mon, because you don‘t see it used too much in public raids. But there was some hype awhile back about Maushold and abusing Population Bomb in raids, and I built a Maushold a while back to use it myself. I tinkered a little with my Maushold to see if I could make it work, thinking that maybe Population Bomb was enough of a nuke that even without stat boosting, I might be able to overpower Gengar before it wore down the team and the timer. My strategy was to use Double Hit first to get double the chance to proc Cursed Body, because its basically impossible to use Population Bomb more than once if you haven’t already disabled something else. I was able to solo a raid or two with Maushold, but I needed LOTS of luck. It wasn’t really reliable at all.
So I decided to build a custom pokemon explicitly for the Gengar raid, and my first attempt at a custom solution was Klefki.
Klefki @ Leftovers/Shell Bell/Sitrus Berry
Ability: Prankster
Tera Type: Steel
EVs: 96 HP / 252 SpDef / 162 SpAtk
Calm Nature
- Flash Cannon
- Misty Terrain
- Calm Mind
- Light Screen / Recycle
The primary driver for using Klefki was to get off priority Misty Terrain to eliminate all the status junk right off the bat. Then CM up and start Flash Cannoning. I quickly found out that against this Klefki, Gengar basically uses only one move and almost literally spams it exclusively: Night Shade. It was ridiculous. I switched to Recycle and Sitrus just to see if I could weather the Night Shade storm for a while and maybe Gengar would shift to something else. But sadly that experiment failed. FWIW, Klefki had staying power in some rando raids I did. And on some rando teams I’m sure they appreciated the Misty Terrain and Light Screen support. But as far as a reliable solution to Gengar — Klefki just couldn’t get it done.
After searching high and low, I accidently stumbled across a real winner. And it came from me looking at one of the only two “natural” shinies I have found in SV (ie. not boosted with sparkling meal power) - Garganacl! I can’t say this is a perfect solution, but compared to the other stuff I tried, it‘s pretty darn reliable. And the fact that I have a beautiful natural shiny of this guy, just makes it all the more fun to use in raids! Here’s the build:
Garganacl @ Loaded Dice
Ability: Purifying Salt
Tera Type: Rock
EVs: 252 HP / 4 SpDef / 252 Atk
Adamant Nature
- Rock Blast
- Heavy Slam
- Sandstorm
- Recover
Purifying Salt handles almost all of the status garbage Gengar throws at you and it debuffs Gengars SpAtk on Ghost attacks, AND that debuff doesn’t get wiped by Gengar on the reset. Very nice! Heavy Slam is 120 BP vs Gengar and really is there as high BP fodder to proc Cursed Body to allow the Rock Blast to be used freely. With Loaded Dice, the Rock Blast does 100 bp minimum and 125 bp often. Sandstorm boosts Garganacls Special Defense because it’s a Rock-type, and, once again, that buff doesn’t get wiped on the reset. Garganacl has a lot of HP, so it can easily Recover off a couple of Night Shades that Gengar throws its way. And like we often see in raids, for some reason the raid AI doesn’t really grok abilities like Purifying Salt, particularly the whole Ghost-type debuff thing. So Gengar regularly shoots Shadow Balls at this big pile of salt blocks and does almost nothing to it.
Mono-Rock typing means Garganacl loses nothing typing-wise when it Teras. How many times have you NOT Tera’ed in a raid because you couldn’t afford to lose one of your key types? I know I have… often. And Purifying Salt is basically Ghost-resistant typing that you don’t lose either when you Tera, which is just poetically perfect for raid running. Aaaand since you can freely Tera Rock as soon as possible (which is fast because Garganacl doesn’t screw around with a lot of setup turns) Rock Blast gets beastly at that stage of the fight. I‘m almost always already Tera’ed before Gengar does the orb-energy steal thingy, so I carry lots of teams through the shield phase. Feels good to be the hero, lol ;-)
In public raids, I’m polite to my fellow raiders and I don’t use Sandstorm to chip my neighbors. But Garganacl is chonky enough to do just fine without the SpDef boost anyway. Sandstorm is really a luxury item for those longer solo raids on your personal cart.
All in all, Garganacl is very reliable and able to cruise through Gengar raids where I struggled or crossed my fingers most of the time with almost everything else. I’ve used it on 3 solo Gengar raids and 5-6 public raids today. I gotta say I love using this guy, because it’s just not… obvious. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s really good if you want to give it a try!
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