#shiny tips

“i cant complete the pokedex!! i only have a specific version and no other friends with switches!!”

there is a community trade code for each regional only pokemon!!!  

trust me. this thing will 100% save ur godamn ass. if u are a shield user, you will encounter many other shield users (because sword users appear just like the shinies) but i PROMISE you u will get the other pokemon. 

if ur trading zac/zam 99% the other person will want to trade back afterwards, so dont worry much about losing ur puppy!!

ok onto the shiny part. 

i didnt bother doing ANY shiny hunting until i finished the pokedex, and thats probably why ive gotten 2 shinies in less than a week. you will have to put into a little effort into the pokedex, but it only takes about a week!!

i hatched around 290 eggs for my shiny cottonee, and around 129 for my shiny zigzagoon!!! the chances of shiny when you use masuda/charm is around 530!!! 

Shiny breeding gets a lot easier (or at least more tolerable) once you understand the mechanics behind it. As of now (Gen VII), shiny pokémon have a chance of about 1/4000 to show up. That means you’d have to breed/catch about 4000 to have a sure way to find one. Naturally, you don’t want want.

Method 1: Catching

If you’re out there to catch a shiny Pokémon, the mechanics works slightly different in each game, but in gen VII, there are a couple of things we know that speed up the process:

Shiny charm

S.O.S. Chaining

The shiny charm is obtained after completing the pokédex. I’ve had a filled pokédex since gen V and all of my pokédex filling pokémon are stored on pokémon bank. Every time a new gen comes out, I simply move those pokémon up tot he newest gen, catch/level up the newest ones introduced that same gen and voilá, easiest way to grab a shiny charm. You can read all about S.O.S. battles and chaining right here.

Personally not a big fan of chaining because I find it tedious and you don’t have any control of the pokémon you’re gonna capture. It could come with any natures, ability and IVs, plus no egg moves, which is terrible competitively. If you don’t care about competitive pokémon though, this is likely the easiest way to catch a shiny pokémon. With the oval charm, starting on the 70th chain your chances of finding a shiny pokémon is 1/341, which is the highest chance you could hope for.

Before you set out for this, make sure you have:

A shit ton of poké ball (or whatever poké ball you want to capture it with)

Method 2: Breeding (Masuda Method)

Breeding is not easy. If you’re breeding competitively, you’ll most likely be breeding your pokémon with a foreign ditto. When you breed with a pokémon that’s from a different region than yours, chances of hatching a shiny pokémon increase to about 1/1024. This is known as the Masuda method.

Cons of this method: really boring. Will probably take forever even through the Masuda method. Chances of your pokémon being hatched without perfect IVs are high.

Pros of this method: Not as boring as it looks, if you are patient enough. If your pokémon comes out with bad IVs, at least hyper training can fix it (the shiny pokémon won’t be a good parent for future breeding though). The hatched pokémon will have your TID and IGN, that’s nice.

Method 3: Breeding (SVExchange)

My favorite method and the most reliable one. Also the fastest one. This is the one I’ve been using for the past three years or so.

This is done by understanding shiny mechanics even better. Long story short, every time you start a new game in pokémon, your game generates a TSV (trainer shiny value). Literally every egg you generate in game has an ESV (egg shiny value). If the ESV of your egg matches your TSV, the pokémon will hatch shiny.

Basically what this means is that if you know your egg’s ESV before it hatches, you can find someone with a matching TSV to hatch it for you. But where are you going to find them?

Well, luckily for us, there’s a sbureddit dedicated just to match TSV and ESV, the SVExhange. I will not go into details here on how to do this because the subreddit already has very in depth FAQ, wiki, rules and other stuff you can read there. They explain how to find out your TSV and your future eggs’ ESV in details.

No, this method is not hacking, you don’t need to use homebrew exploits or CFW, you don’t need anything that modifies or changes your save files, etc. It’s perfectly legit and you don’t need anything other than a second 3DS to help you with the battle videos (or a friend with a 3DS that could battle you, that’s how I did during gen VI with a physical copy of the game) or a micro SD card reader to check the egg info from your save file (this is how I’m doing on gen VII, with a digital copy of the game). If you don’t have either, the SVExchange subreddit also has people that will gladly check your TSV and ESV for you.

The subreddit is built on trust and willingness to help, so if you wanna get shines this way, make sure you also give back to the community by setting your own TSV thread and hatching for people who match your TSV.

Cons of this method: Your pokémon won’t have your TID and IGN so if that’s important to you, you’ll probably want to avoid this method.

Pros of this method: Much faster, you can completely control which nature, ability, EMs, IVs, gender you want, pretty much effortless.

Regardless of which method you choose, always have extra poké balls with you, you never know when that shiny pokémon will pop up in the grass and always grab the shiny charm first. Even before you start checking for ESVs in your eggs, you’ll still breed for a while to get that perfect pokémon (if you want a competitive mon), which means hey, you just might wind up hatching a shiny yourself (happened a couple of times with me actually), which means they keep your IGN and TID. Cool beans!