Pokemon Violet - 7* Charizard the Unrivaled first clear
17* raids!
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet decided to go one step further than Sword/Shield's event raids (which usually had rare stuff like Gigantamax Pokemon, then non-regional dex Pokemon, then super-challenging uncatchable Pokemon with great rewards): around once per month they'll introduce a time-limited 7* raid (even harder than the base game's already-really-hard daily 6* raids) only available for a few days (albeit rerun a second time a few weeks later, though that's it), featuring a rare Pokemon with a special tera type that you can only catch one of.
The first one is tera dragon Charizard, a Pokemon not in the regional dex!
It has a pretty mean trick: right at the very start, it uses Overheat and then immediately wipes its -2 SpA debuff, so before you can even do anything you already get attacked.
...But as it turns out, Charizard then never wipes its own debuffs ever again; stuff like buff-wipes or debuff-wipes or other extra attacks or even the shield popping up are all triggered by specific thresholds, either time-based or health-based, and Charizard happens to only have a single debuff-wipe. (The instant-Overheat is coded as 'do Overheat after 4 seconds'; these time thresholds are technically based on the orange time bar below the health bar, so someone dying and taking a chunk out usually procs a time-based response.)
As a result, an easy way to clear 7* Charizard is to just survive its initial attack... and then debuff its stats to -6! Screech for -2 Def, Noble Roar for -1 SpA... you can even resort to stuff like Mud-Slap for -1 accuracy. It's not used here, but Dachsbun quickly became a pretty easy-to-raise support for this raid, as Well-Baked Body makes you fire-immune and you can spam Mud-Slap and Tail Whip and Snarl and so on for debuffs.
7* Charizard happens to only have special attacks: its main movepool has Fire Blast, Hurricane, Dragon Pulse, and Focus Blast, and its time-threshold moves include Overheat, Sunny Day, and Tera Blast (which is dragon). As a result, you can just focus on special defenses! Light Screen is, of course, great here.
As for actually defeating it...
The early raid meta involved multiple Perrserker (a Galar Meowth is a gift Pokemon) with Steely Spirit to boost the entire team's steel damage, so you'd just have four Perrserker buff/debuff then one does a super-Iron Head, and then soon after that people figured out three Perrserker supporting a Tinkaton's Gigaton Hammer is even better... but then people started to realize that getting groups together for farming raids is a bit too much trouble given the meager rewards and also pubs simply couldn't be trusted to do complex strats like this, and so selfish speed strats started to emerge.
By which I mean Belly Drum.
Huge Power Azumarill using Belly Drum into Play Rough/Liquidation is a pretty big nuke, though slightly unsafe given Play Rough's imperfect accuracy (though you can hold a Shell Bell). Iron Hands using Belly Drum and Electric Terrain can then heal up with Drain Punch and/or attack with Thunder Punch, which is also pretty safe. Unfortunately the other Belly Drum users aren't really as useful as these two (Ursaring is basically only notable for Guts-boosted Giga Impact, and Cetitan has nice coverage but that's not really useful for raids)...
As a result, though, lots of people already had an Azumarill prepared! And so that's what I went with. Confusion from Hurricane and burn from Fire Blast are both pretty dangerous for a +6 Atk attacker, but thankfully a heal cheer clears all afflictions.
All 7* raid Pokemon come with six perfect IVs plus a unique Mightiest Mark which of course can't be gotten in any other way. As a result, I decided to catch every single 7* in a Master Ball, befitting their status..!
If you want to solo 7* Charizard (for its insane dragon tera shard rewards, over 15 per run!), you kinda need to do both debuffs and offense yourself. Thankfully, Azumarill gets Tail Whip/Tickle for -1 Def, and so you can slowly get Charizard to -6 Def (after setting up Light Screen for survival furst), then heal up and Belly Drum then Play Rough for an actual one-shot.
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