Pokémon Scarlet & Violet - Blastoise the Unrivaled
9After a week of Venusaur the Unrivaled is the next Kanto colleague, Blastoise the Unrivaled. A nice opportunity for me, Blastoise assumes the Steel Tera type, meaning it gives out Steel Tera Shards. A nice opportunity because I nearly depleted my supply of Steel Tera Shards figuring out what to do with Empoleon the Unrivaled, and this would be my ticket to replenish them. I just have to not forget.
Blastoise is not quite as famous in pop culture as Charizard, but it’s one of the most fondly remembered Pokémon (as is the base form, Squirtle). Show a random person on the street a picture of Blastoise and ask them to identify this character, and it’s fairly likely they’ll answer correctly. And just as tortoises are slow but reliable, Blastoise’s time in the competitive charts has not quite reached the heights Venusaur and Charizard have, but it’s never been completely irrelevant like they have been. In the video games, at least. In the Trading Card Game, Blastoise will forever be associated with Rain Dance, an Ability that lets you bypass the one-Energy-per-limit rule for Water Energy. It’s one thing I always liked about the TCG: it’s an exceptions-based game, with many cards designed to create exceptions for rules and namy other cards that are hideously strong if not for those rules. I took the same approach to the TCG as I do to the Pokémon video games: I’d make my decks away from the metagame, and particularly in Generations III and IV, there were so many possibilities that it was easy to come up with something new every month.
But this is not a video about the TCG. This is the 7-star Tera Raid Battle against Blastoise the Unrivaled, and combing through what Blastoise could do, I came up with this:
Gastrodon (Slurpee)
Level 100
Ability: Storm Drain
Effort Points: 252 HP, 252 Sp. Attack, 6. Sp. Defense
Hold Item: Maranga Berry
Nature: Quiet
Tera: Water
Moves: Earth Power, Recover, Helping Hand, Skitter Smack
From the get-go, Blastoise will use Withdraw to increase Defense, then put up the barrier. This effectively prevents you from using debilitating status moves on it like Taunt, Encore, Spore, Screech. Since its Tera type is Steel, you also can’t use Clear Smog. About halfway through, it’ll use Shell Smash and Rain Dance, the latter to activate Rain Dish and increase the power of Water moves. Since it uses so many stat boosts, including Shell Smash, a move that causes stat drops too, Blastoise will reset its own stat drops fairly early on, then again a short time after using Shell Smash. Like all high-ranked Tera Raid Battle Pokémon, Blastoise also resets your Pokémon’s stat gains. Overall though, I still consider it worth lowering Blastoise’s Sp. Attack to blunt its moves wherever possible.
In this case, Gastrodon happens to have acquired Skitter Smack in Indigo Disk, making it an ideal Pokémon for the job. (I chose West Sea because I like its design a bit more.) The rest of Gastrodon’s moves should be obvious.
This time, I actually DID encounter other people using Gastrodon, even on the first day (Tuesday, March 5th, 2024), and it’s been working pretty well for me indeed. So well that this was one of my shorter Tera Raid Battles (though looking at my videos, the ones for (Alolan) Decidueye, Hisuian Typhlosion, and Eevee were shorter).
Other Videos By Overhazard
Other Statistics
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Statistics For Overhazard
Overhazard presently has 59,173 views for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet across 209 videos, and about 22 hours worth of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet videos were uploaded to his channel. This is 2.52% of the total watchable video on Overhazard's YouTube channel.