Best Pokémon for Iron Bundle Tera Raid: How to beat the Iron Bundle seven-star Tera Raid event

Here’s all you need to know about the upcoming Iron Bundle raids in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet

The next seven-star raid event in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has a distinctly wintery theme, and is a huge win for Scarlet players in particular. While Iron Bundle is usually exclusive to Pokémon Violet, everyone will be able to grab one in the upcoming raid event. Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming Iron Bundle raids.

When does the Iron Bundle raid start?

Unlike some of the other seven-star raid events, Iron Bundle will only be available for one weekend as a special holiday raid. If you don’t want to miss out on catching an Iron Bundle, you’d better be ready to grab it this weekend.

Here’s the dates when you can catch Iron Bundle.

• From Friday, December 22, 2023, until Sunday, December 24, 2023

7-Star Tera Raid Iron Bundle stats, moves, and ability – Pokémon Scarlet & Violet

Iron Bundle 7-Star Tera Raid :: The Pokémon Company / Nintendo

Iron Bundle is known for both its impressive speed, and for its amazing special attack stat. It will likely always be the first to attack, and when it does it will hit hard. It has decent defenses, but its special defense is very low, so you will likely need a Pokémon with good defenses, and also good special attack.

Luckily Iron Bundle doesn’t have a very deep movepool, but we can see it opening with Snowscape and Aurora Veil to boost its defenses as the fight opens. This will likely be enough to protect it until the barrier goes up. Moves like Chilling Water, and Hydro Pump can tear through Fire-types, while Blizzard has the chance to freeze. It's also running Electric Terrain to make the most of its Paradox ability.

Here’s Iron Bundle’s set:

The Mightiest Iron Bundle – Level 100

• Nature – Modest
• Ability – Quark Drive
• Item – None
• Tera type – Ice
• Move set – Blizzard, Hydro Pump, Snowscape, Aurora Veil, Chilling Water, Electric Terrain, Freeze-Dry

Best counters for Iron Bundle – Pokémon Scarlet & Violet

We've found Iron Bundle's raid to be quite buggy, with certain abilities not activating, accuracy not really meaning much – we saw it miss zero Hydro Pumps over about a dozen attempts at this raid – and even some crashes. In one instance, a crash resulted in some of the changes we'd made to our Pokémon in terms of its Tera type, EVs, and ability get reverted, despite the items we'd used still disappearing. It's all very weird, but frankly not surprising given Scarlet & Violet's history.

Because of that, we're only offering one strategy for this surprisingly difficult raid, though we've theorized that it could be doable with a few different strategies, too — duoing the raid with a Slowking running Brick Break, Amnesia, Rest, and Stored Power alongside an Alcremie running Decorate seems more than doable with enough luck and patience.

That said, here's our number one pick for taking down Iron Bundle:

Empoleon

We picked Empoleon because it's one of very few Pokémon that either resists or is neutral to all of Iron Bundle's moves while still running Brick Break to take out Aurora Veil. We'd love to suggest you run Competitive, but for whatever reason, in this raid, it doesn't seem to work.

Brick Break is the perfect first-turn move, to take out Aurora Veil as quickly as possible, and after that it's just a battle of attrition. Flash Cannon is your best bet for dealing damage, Mud Slap is theoretically a good call for lowering accuracy but Iron Bundle seems to cheat and hit more often than it should, and Ice Spinner takes out Electric Terrain.

We tried running this set with Bright Powder, but that didn't seem to do much, but Assault Vest does seem to do its job just fine, so that's as good an item as any. Bringing a bulky, defensive support Pokémon like Bronzong can help speed the process up, but as long as you're not throwing moves away, you should be fine with a couple of Empoleon. Alternatively, you could just go online and hope for random players to carry you through while keeping yourself alive — it's a rude strategy, but with a broken   raid like this, it's viable enough.

Here's our full set for Empoleon:

Empoleon – Level 100

• Nature – Calm
• Ability – Torrent / Competitive
• Item – Assault Vest
• Tera type – Steel

Moves – Brick Break, Ice Spinner, Mud-Slap, Flash Cannon

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