"Against All Odds: A 7-man EX Raid Success Story (levels 36, 32, 26, 25, 23, 17, & 13) - First non-sponsored EX raid in a San Francisco suburban area"

#PokemonGO: I started a Telegram group for a San Francisco suburban area that has grown to nearly 1200 users. To date we've had 10 EX raids in our area, 9 of which were at our 3 Starbucks and 2 Sprint locations. The first 7 sponsored EX raids had ~40-70 people invited. Saturday's 2 had just 17 at one location and 30 at the other. In addition to the 2 Starbucks EX raids on Saturday, we had our first non-sponsored EX raid at a local park. Niantic setup the 7 attendees for abject failure. Perhaps 10 invites went out if I had to guess, but only 7 people showed. There was no spoofer assistance. Only 3 accounts with connections to our Telegram group were invited (levels 32, 26, & 25). The remaining 4 included 3 neighborhood kids (levels 23, 17, and 13) and level 36 guy who lives in the area but primarily plays in the San Francisco financial district (he had done an EX raid near work previously). It was incredibly lucky the Mewtwo had Psycho Cut/Hyper Beam. At the time I thought it possible the moveset was handpicked by a Niantic employee as a grace extended to this extremely unqualified little group as part of the testing. But as I've read more and more reports of groups this small, and smaller, having failed, I now know it was definitely just RNG. I ended up playing on the level 25 account since it would have otherwise been played by someone double fisting phones. I don't believe any of the Pokémon on the account were above level 20, but thankfully there were 2 Mewtwos to fight with. There was no Stardust to speak of, but there were 2 Charged TMs on the account I was given permission to use. One Mewtwo already had Shadow Ball, the other had Psychic. I was extremely lucky Psychic changed to Shadow Ball with a single Charged TM because I needed the other TM to get rid of Fire Blast on the single Tyranitar on the account. Unfortunately got Stone Edge instead of Crunch, but still an improvement. The account also had a legacy Shadow Claw Gengar and some Enteis/Raikous. The first 2 tries were kinda, sorta close (we got in the red) but we were still extremely doubtful whether it could be defeated. The 45-minute raid time really added a lot of undue stress to the situation. Before the 3rd attempt, with 15 minutes left on the raid, the level 36 guy spent a lot of Stardust. On that third attempt we ended up beating Mewtwo with about 40 seconds left on the clock. Obviously the level 36 guy spending Stardust was the key, but it wasn't until that 3rd attempt that we realized we had to show those neighborhood kids how to use a charge move by holding down on the screen... All in all, an extremely stressful but incredibly satisfying experience. 6 out of 7 people caught Mewtwo, with the one person who missed it being the lowest level in attendance, the level 13 neighborhood kid. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2ADwojr