"We had five successful EX raids at Sprint store today"

#PokemonGO: I did my first EX raid today and I figured that I may have a story to share with you and you may find it helpful. I was one of those Instinct players to receive an EX raid invite on Wednesday morning and so did many of fellow Pokemon Go players in my local Facebook group chat and Discords. Forgive me if my English isn't perfect as I'm deaf so it's not my native language.EX Raid Invitations:Our EX raid was located in Rochester, New York and there were two other nearly locations that had EX raids as well (Greece and Victor). The raid begin at 6pm to 7pm just like all of Sprint store's EX raids.When people got their EX raid invitations, we had to set up a coordination on our Facebook group and Discord to see who else gotten an EX Raid invitation. We had about 45 confirmed players from both Discord and Facebook groups (there were likely some players not on either platform) and we also discussed raid start times for each team just a couple of days before the raid.For those who are wondering. I haven't raided on that gym for 3 weeks (the Zapdos raid was the last time I did there) and there has been some reports that several players haven't raided for 4 weeks on the same gym. That might help to narrow down the definition of "recent" by Niantic.Before EX Raid:The raid coordinator was surprised to see that there was more than 45 people showed up in the today's raid and it kept going up afterward. The final amount of players we had at the raid was 77 players with invitations and 15 spectators that bring to the total of 92 people. Many players were surprised to see that amount, considering that we thought invitations would be limited to less than 50 players. It is possible that there were more players who received the invitations but never showed up. I'd assume that there were about 100 invitations went out for that EX raid.Some players arrived at the gym about an hour early to take over gym for bonus balls. Unlikely previous EX raids, there was an egg timer on top of the gym that look like any normal legendary raid egg timers. However, players who never received an invitation are unable to see the egg timer. Although they are able to battle the gym before the raid begins, they cannot battle the gym once the EX raid has appeared and will show a message that say "This Gym is closed for an EX Raid. It will reopen at 19:00PM".Teams and Mewtwo's Battle:With 77 players we had, we were able to split into three different groups and one person from each team was holding their team sign to eliminate "What team are you" questions. The amounts of players we had from each team is:16 Instinct players - Team Instinct's group picture27 Valor players - Team Valor's group picture34 Mystic players - Team Mystic's group pictureNote: Not everyone is in the picture, some people opted out or didn't notice that we were taking group pictures.Since there were so many players, we had to split in five lobbies (2 Mystic, 2 Valor, 1 Instinct) and first two Mystic groups entered the battle first to see how tough Mewtwo is. Only to find that they absolutely destroyed Mewtwo within 60 seconds. That gave massive reliefs across players in the area and they suddenly became very confident. Mewtwo had Psycho Cut / Psychic movesets (thankfully, it's not Focus Blast that everyone was talking about).Shortly after that, all three groups (2 Valor and 1 Instinct) processed immediately and my Instinct group managed to beat Mewtwo in only 69 seconds. Most of players ended the battle with their 2nd pokemon being alive and they mostly used Ttars and Scizors.Catching Screen:After beating Mewtwo, I ended up getting:6 balls for defeating the boss1 ball for damage2 balls for gym control3 balls for team contributionTotal: 12 premier ballsI managed to catch Mewtwo after 5 balls, which isn't too bad considering that it has 6% base capture rate. I used golden razz, curve ball and great circle. I also didn't want to risk excellent throws because Mewtwo! There were lots of people being nervous or excited that might mess up with their throws. Especially when there were a lot of adrenaline going from the fight, and then there's the nerves of potentially not catching it. There were even four players who asked me to catch Mewtwo for them and managed to catch all four for them.The distance of Mewtwo from your screen seems to be between Raikous and Lapras from what I've seen. It's not too difficult to catch.After Raid and Catching Results:After the catching screen ends, the gym has a different "completed" icon comparing to other raid icons. Personally, I think it look awesome and I don't know why it has a Lugia head on it but it look cool.Lots of players were screaming and jumped around when they caught their very first Mewtwo. After the raid ended, we managed to collect the data and it turned out that 10 players out of 77 players were NOT able to catch Mewtwo. It was devastating for them considering that they might never get another EX raid invitation, at least not anytime soon.Our biggest accomplishment that we did is that we left NO ONE behind. We made sure that not a single player was left behind and it was a huge success. Using coordination through Discord and Facebook clearly helped. We eventually said goodbye and parted ways after a while after catching Mewtwo.TL:DR:Did not raid at that gym for three weeks before EX raid.Had 77 players and 15 spectators showed up in the area.Gym had a legendary egg with timer before EX raid.Players without EX raid invitations can't see the egg timer.16 Instinct, 27 Valor and 34 Mystic players were present.Five lobbies (1 Instinct group, 2 Valor groups and 2 Mystic groups).My Instinct group defeated Mewtwo in only 69 seconds.Distance of Mewtwo from your screen seems to be between Raikous and Lapras.After catching, 10 players out of 77 players didn't get a Mewtwo.Most importantly, we left NO ONE behind!EDIT: Formatting via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2x3KJXB