Sunday 24^th May 2020

Today was Pokemon Community Day and the first time I’ve not played the entire event.

I’ve mentioned before that I find Pokemon Go a reminder of the “old world”, of a time when we’d drive around town, coordinating raids and mopping up every Pokémon with our gotchas. With lockdown, it became unessential travel, and whilst there have been measures introduced to play at home, it’s the one time I feel the constrictions of lockdown.

Of course, we’ve managed. Measures put in place have been great for playing at home but they feel like a compromise. And so I’d rather put the effort into other games like Warcraft rather than have that reminder all the time.

Today was Seedot community day. It’s a decent set of shinies – I mean some you can hardly tell the difference between the regular and the variant. But in both PvP and PvE, it’s nothing to get excited about.

I also have a storage problem. Because we’ve always gone quite hard at the game, it usually means we have spares of the rare pokemon, and so I’ve always kept them for trades. Except, everyone seems as bad at having something to trade as I am at sending gifts right now. I get that I might have most things which makes having something I don’t a challenge, but surely people have spares of the Pokemon that could be useful? Gible? A legendary? It seems not.

So I run out of storage and come every community day, trying to find 200 space to play the day gets more and more a challenge. I have a shiny dex, a shadow dex, Great league and Ultra league Pokemon, trades, and a living dex of anything over 96% IV.

Trying to find a good PvP community Day pokemon has been a nice added challenge to the event in the last year. I use search strings and apps to quickly try and find the decent Pokemon in my storage to evolve for the special move. However, somehow I end up with a number of ranked Great League Pokemon when I really only need the best.

Abra Community Day I did brilliantly. I got a ridiculous amount of shinies… which then sit there eating storage because I don’t like to delete them.

And with Elite TMs now in the game, whereas it was wise to evolve extra Community Day Pokemon to trade down the line…. Someone can now just TM the move if they really want it. I cannot tell you how many really good Feraligator with CD moves I have which I’ve never needed, never traded and now am unlikely ever to have to.

So today I went with a different approach. Shiftry wasn’t a Pokemon that I want a ton of, and I don’t really need any to trade so the aim was simple: a decent PvP Shiftry, a shiny Shiftry and a decent PVE one.

I like that the play at home community days have got extended but I ended up only playing 3 hours. I managed to get a rank 1 great league Shiftry, and a 96% PvE one. I also got 10 shinies, including one that was 89% IV. I even evolved my shadow seedot for the future.

So within a few hours I was done. It felt odd, abandoning play after my incense ran out, but save a 100% PvE one or shiny, how could I do better? It also meant my storage wouldn’t get clogged up with more shinies and I’d have some space to play during the week (Seriously, until I did a clear down the night before the event I was running on about 3 spaces).

I still need to do a massive clear down… delete those regionals to the best and at most a couple of spares; have a shiny cull. It’s a massive job, and one I don’t find particularly fun at the moment. Hopefully, with lockdowns easing, we can get out and play a bit wider again (whilst maintaining proper social distancing precautions) and my enjoyment will pick up more.