Get Your Shadow Groudon

On Wednesday March 27th, we’ll be getting a new Team Rocket special research, in which we can save Shadow Groudon. Now, people around here might know that Groudon is one of my favourite Legendary Pokemon, and I’m desperate for a chance to add one to my collection. Shadow Groudon will definitely be a good Pokemon to have, since it not only does good damage, but it also isn’t a complete glass cannon, meaning it won’t die instantly. The same can’t be said for Shadow Darumaka/Darmanitan, which are also coming in the World of Wonders: Taken Over event starting on the 27th.

The research for these is almost always the same. Defeat a bunch of grunts, defeat the three leaders, then fight Giovanni and catch the legendary Pokemon. And, at the same time, we’ll get standard Rocket Takeover event bonuses like matching spawns, a handful of new shadow Pokemon (Darumaka, Pidgey, Gothitelle and Solosis) and we’ll be able to remove Frustration from Shadow Pokemon.

Shadow Groudon in particular is going to be very good because, terrifyingly, it is better than Mega Garchomp and is only beaten by Primal Groudon when it comes to damage. Sure, you’ll need to power it up and spend an Elite TM on said Shadow Groudon for Precipice Blades, but ground is strong against electric, steel, rock, fire and poison and four of those are pretty common types that you might find yourself raiding against. Shadow Groudon though will be useful, even more so because we just had Primal Groudon Raid Day, and that’ll give us plenty of candy to power up our new Shadow Pokemon.

The only downside is that I have one shot at a good Shadow Groudon, and will probably have to wait at least a couple of years until it finally rotates into weekend Shadow Legendary Raids. And, seeing how bad my luck has been on all my Giovanni Shadow Legendaries (except one), I will probably get yet another 0-star one. Sadly, I can’t even wait for weather boosts either, because that only raises the minimum to 4/4/4, while Shadow Legendaries have a base of 6/6/6. I’m still going to grab mine as soon as I can though, so I can remove Frustration off of it.

Now, while I may be an idiot and wasted my Super Rocket Radars on getting every Shadow Legendary as they’ve come out, not realizing that they’ve been slowly adding Shadow Legendaries to raids, you can avoid my mistakes. There are ways to ‘stack’ Super Rocket Radars, and that’s by simply not starting Team Rocket research and not going past the first step. On my now-abandoned little account, I actually have a Super Rocket Radar ready to go to catch Shadow Groudon and there’s also one in the Timeless Travels research that can be left unclaimed if you don’t progress on that research too.

That being said, it might be worth holding on. If the pattern is correct, after Shadow Groudon, we’ll get Shadow Rayquaza. While I personally think Shadow Groudon is more useful (there are more Pokemon weak to ground types), Shadow Rayquaza is going to blow all other dragon types out of the water, as well as being one of the best generalist attackers around. At the same time though, we’re also getting Shadow Mewtwo in level 5 Shadow Raids, and Shadow Mewtwo does the same generalist job while having more generalist moves.

Still, I definitely recommend getting your Shadow Groudon. It’s a cool Pokemon, it’ll serve you well.