Pokemon Go: How to defeat Elgyem, weakness and counters

ByAdam B Hours
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Elgyem weakness counters guide header image

Last Updated on: 29th July 2021, 03:38 pm

Elgyem is going to appear during Ultra Unlock, so here are some tips on the weakness of the Cerebral Pokemon and how to counter it.

This guide is intended to give you a short answer and a long answer on what the best choices to counter Elgyem are, based on its targetable weakness in Pokemon Go. After a short read, you should be ready to take on the Celebral Pokemon, Elgyem.

What is the biggest Weakess of Elgyem in Pokemon Go?

Dark-Types are the absolute best counter choice for fighting Elgyem in Pokemon Go, they will ignore 3 of its 5 attacks, and resist the remaining 2, all the while dealing Super-Effective damage with their own attacks.

The Bug-Type has no particular interactions while fighting Elgyem beyond dealing its own Super-Effective damage, making it a safe choice, though clearly second best. Ghost-Types meanwhile should likely be avoided as they will struggle against some of Elgyems possible attacks.

How did we find the most exploitable weakness?

As is typical in any Pokemon title, including Go, precisely how strong a Pokemon is and what moves it uses may vary depending on the individual, but there are a few things that remain consistent across all of any given species of Pokemon.

The easiest of these to exploit is often the Pokemon’s Type.

Elgyem is a pure Psychic-Type, making this a fairly simple question to answer as we just need to know the Type Interactions of Psychic-Types to know how to deal with Elgyem. If you don’t know those though, no worries, I’ve covered that below.

Elgyem in the Pokemon anime
Credit: TonsOfFacts

Elgyem Type Interactions in Pokemon Go

Resistances
  • Fighting
  • Psychic

Both of these Types have their damage reduced to 62.5% against Elgyem due to it being a Psychic-Type.

Weaknesses
  • Bug
  • Dark
  • Ghost

All of these types meanwhile are possible Elgyem counter choices in Pokemon Go, as each has a 160% total damage dealt modifier due to hitting a weakness in Elgyems typing. Sadly, no double-weaknesses involved for that huge Super-Effective damage on this one though.

So, to pick the best counter choice for battling Elgyem out of all of these, let’s go take a look at what Elgyem can do in Pokemon Go.

Elgyem in the Pokemon anime 2
Credit: Bulbapedia

READ MORE: Pokemon Go: How to find out what gender a Pokemon is

What moves do Elgyem use in battle?

Fast Attacks
  • Astonish (Ghost)
  • Confusion (Psychic)
Charged Attacks
  • Dark Pulse (Dark)
  • Psybeam (Psychic)
  • Psychic (Psychic)

Ghost-Types struggle against both Dark-Type moves and other Ghost-Types, so they are unlikely to be our most promising option for a counter here.

Bug-Types are perfectly safe here, with no real interactions with any of these moves, thus meaning they just take standard damage while dealing Super-Effective damage – a good matchup, but not the best option we have. No, the best option we have here are Dark-Types.

Dark-Types will negate Psychic attacks, which is already huge in this matchup as that ignores 3 of Elgyems 5 attacks, but they also resist both Dark and Ghost-Type attacks, giving them an advantage against literally everything any Elgyem can possible do in Pokemon Go.

Elgyem counters and weakness Summary

This brings our conclusion to be favouring Dark-Types heavily, though Bug-Type makes an acceptable backup plan if you’re short on Dark-Types.

Ghost-Type is still a counter matchup for Elgyem, but it does have unnecessary risks when you consider how much better both the alternatives are at exploiting Elgyem and its weakness in Pokemon Go.

That’s about everything for this one.

If you’d like more stories, articles and guides for Pokemon Go, you can find them right here on The Click, and if you’d instead like to see more by me specifically, a list of my articles is available here.