Porygon Community Day – Eh

Porygon was the winner of the community day vote back in August, a vote that was done on Twitter. Considering the other options in the vote, it’s no wonder Porygon won. Charmander has featured in multiple events and already had a community day. Grimer already has two shiny forms and, worse, the Alolan one would be restricted to raids only. And Caterpie is, well, Caterpie. But even then, Porygon community day has been… meh.

“Why did Porygon even win?”

That’s a good question. Porygn isn’t an amazing Pokemon. But, compared to the other options, it kinda is. Porygon didn’t have a shiny up until today. It also didn’t have a special move or anything. And it’s a three-stage evolution, which makes it fit in with normal community days. More importantly though, Porygon is kinda rare. The only time it was really around was during Team Rocket events. But Normal Team Rocket Grunts currently have Rattata, not Porygon.

So, all things considered, not too bad.

Unfortunately, it’s still meh.

Despite Porygon being rare, that doesn’t mean it’s good. Normal type Pokemon are screwed over in Pokemon Go because there’s no utility in Pokemon Go. In the main games, Normal types aren’t insanely strong but have a ton of strong moves. You won’t ever deal super effective damage. But that’s fine, because you will almost always hit for regular damage and you have other options, like buffs and debuffs, available to you.

In Pokemon Go, the more damage you do, the better. But since you can’t ever deal super effective damage, using different types becomes more important. And, sadly, Porygon Community Day does nothing to fix that. Tri-Attack is an okay move, but PorygonZ is too weak to use it in PvP and any other Pokemon tends to be more useful in Raids.

So there’s no need to catch a huge amount.

Really, it’s a Pokedex entry for a lot of people. And a new shiny. Those are always nice. Otherwise though, there’s no reason to go completely ham on this community day. It doesn’t help that Porygon is a little bit of a pain to catch. Not as bad as, say, Abra, but it breaks out and moves around a lot.

In fact, I only played about 2 hours of the 6 hour event. I’ll be honest, I didn’t properly stock up on Pokeballs before the event (on either of my accounts), so I was constantly running out. 30 free Ultra Balls is nice, but you need 42 Pokeballs at minimum to be able to catch enough Porygon to evolve one into a PorygonZ. On the plus side though, there WAS free research that gave you sinnoh stones and upgrades. This meant that, even if you’d never seen a Porygon before, you could at least evolve one.

I didn’t bother with the paid $1 research. There wasn’t much to it and the Incense and local spawns were plenty good enough. The bonus also wasn’t that great. Extra experience when catching Pokemon is alright, but it’s still rather meh, just because you need so much experience to level up.

Overall, it was an alright day.

Really, the only negative problem with September’s Community Day was that it featured Porygon, which isn’t that interesting a Pokemon. The shiny is nice, the availability is nice and the move is alright. But Porygon just isn’t going to attract that many crowds.

But no matter what, it’s going to be better than next month’s community day. Because Charmander came in second place in August’s vote. So now we have the massive problem of a repeat Pokemon with multiple Community Day moves, that’s been featured in nearly every single event this year…