Grass Knot, Surf, or Focus Blast for Alolan Raichu in AG?

I’m kind of deciding which one will be betterGrass Knot: Covers Ground, but depends on opponents weight. And doesn’t work on dynamax PokemonSurf: Covers Ground, has a more fixed power, but makes me struggle against Gastrodon, and the like.Focus Blast: Covers Dark, High Power, but good chance to missOf course there are more coverage moves out there, but these are the most used.

Here’s my set at the moment. I used this set, in Monotype Gen 8, Gen 8 AG, Doubles, NatDex AG,and others I don’t remember

Alolan Raichu @ Electric SeedSurge SurferTimid NatureEVs 252 Sp. Atk / 4 Sp. Def / 252 SpeedRising VoltagePsyshock/Expanding ForceGrass Knot/SurfNasty Plot

Here. Hope I gave enough detail. And hopefully doesn’t duplicate a question

Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.

When you play Doubles OU, you should use Mew or Zeraora instead of Raichu.sourceWhen you play AG or National Pokedex AG, you should use shadow Calyrex instead of Raichu.sourcesourceRaichu has a significant niche only in Monotype, so the rest of this answer is about Monotype.

Focus Blast is great against Dark- and Steel-types like Tyranitar and Excadrill. Grass Knot is great against Ground-types in Gastrodon, Hippowdon, and Seismitoad.

sourceSo focus blast is overall slightly better than grass knot, and both are a lot better than surf. Which one is better for you and your team depends on which opponents threaten your team the most.

Grass Knot is definitely a no. It tends to be weaker than it needs to be, and would be a second Water coverage. Rising Voltage is better than Grass Knot, and is STAB.

Surf only covers types you don’t at the moment, Fire, Ground, and Rock. It has a Base Power of 90, which is nothing to sneeze at, but definitely isn’t comparable to Focus Blast’s Power. Surf obviously does have the negative of hitting your ally in Doubles.

Focus Blast is a hard hitter and a hard misser. It’s accuracy is t e r r I b l e, and you only have 8 PP to go with it. In exchange, it’s really powerful, and one of very few Special Fighting moves. It helps many Special Attackers get good Normal/Dark type coverage, (Alakazam and Gengar come to mind,) but tends to fall short to Aura Sphere, with better accuracy and more PP, just with a lower Base Power.

With it’s poor accuracy, Focus Blast just falls too short for me. It could work on Doubles paired with a Machamp, (which might actually work pretty well,) but it’s negatives catch up to it’s positives. If you ran Life Orb instead of Electric Seed, Grass Knot/Surf would work. In that case you would probably change Rising Voltage to Thunderbolt, and you would end up with ~120 Base Power for both TBolt and Surf.

If you don’t want to change from Electric Seed to Life Orb, then I would definitely go with Surf. Good Base Power, coverage against a lot of types, and good PP are not all things that Grass Knot and Focus Blast can claim to have.

Hope I could help!