I'm amused by how off my tier list is. Terra was soloed by my starter (contrary serperior) and Rocky was similarly my starter + excadrill doing everything. I mostly found early gyms hard with charlotte being the last difficult gym. Grass starter also felt like a sucky early gym choice. After that I trained more and more varied pokemon so I had a large variety of counters. Titania was mostly soloed by excadrill and Amaria was essentially soloed by serperior.
S - Charlotte, Aya. These two gyms required a good deal of unique preparation. Both fields were painful and Aya forced me to go get a mist pokemon to end her field effect. Charlotte I was surprised by water types faring a lot worse than expected due to her field wasting a lot of my training time.
A - Shelly, Florina. I did not get my slugma yet for Florina so her battle saw me use 0 fire types. I think in general my team was still pretty sucky here and I didn't really learn to expand much til later.
B - Corey, Noel, Samson. Both had annoying finishers. Corey's crobat outsped everything and single handedly made me lose half my team a couple rounds. Noel's last pokemon just didn't want to die. Samson took several tries.
C - Julia, Luna, Shade, Kiki, Radomus, Serra, Amaria. Julia was done 2nd try by volt absorb pachirisu. The rest I think were 2nd/3rd try without requiring me to do any grinding and just using my main team. Amaria was the exception and could go in rank B. On one hand she took 6ish tries. On the other hand all I was doing was trying to get serperior to last as he had the attack to kill her but not the bulk. In the end my strategy was doubles, serperior attacks every turn and his partner heals him.
D - Terra, Hardy, Titania, Ciel, All gyms that my first try was victory (except maybe ciel). I did titania and hardy expecting to lose and make plans based on their pokemon, but instead excadrill screwed them heavily. I don't really remember ciel so not sure if that was 1st/2nd try but either way being forgettable means I didn't have to think much for her.
Lastly while excadrill shined a lot in later gyms his real feat that made me proud was doing most of the episode 18 gauntlet for me. Sandstorm + sand rush + swords dance = sweep everything
