Swablu Community Day

Swablu has always kinda annoyed me. People complain about other lazy Pokemon designs all the time. While Trubbish gets dumped on for being rubbish, I feel Swablu is also lazy. It’s literally just a blue ball with some wings made of clouds. However, Swablu is a pain in the butt in other ways. It’s the Magikarp of its generation but it just evolves into a bigger blue ball with wings. And gets the dragon typing.

Swablu is still kinda popular though, enough so that it has a Mega Evolution. And here in Pokemon GO, it also got a Community Day.

Time to get some gold balls with cloudy wings.

Swablu Community Day is mostly the same as other ones. Tons of Swablu around, a €1 research thingy, research tasks for catching Swablus. Amazingly, the very first Swablu I clicked on was shiny, that’s actually the first time I had that happen. There is a bit of a twist though. This is one of the few Community Days where we have double bonuses. The Community Bonus is 1/4 hatching distances. But the x3 catch bonus from the Luminous Legends X event is still active. So double-bubble, I guess. However, double catch candy would have been way better for this 400 candy Pokemon.

Thankfully, the Community Day research was a bit better too. It included incense, an incubator and a rocket radar, as well as 300 Swablu candy. Then again, it has a task to evolve a Swablu. So that’s 400 candy gone.

Almost too good for PvP.

However Altaria is the KING of PvP. It’s a dragon-flying type with a LOT of bulk and a ton of resistances. Resisting Water and Grass types is great. Altaria also has a ton of great moves, several of which have STAB. Sky Attack is a strong, little-resisted move and does a lot of the heavy lifting alongside Dragon Breath. In fact, Dragon Breath is so strong that it does a huge chunk of Swablu’s damage, despite being a fast attack. Peck in comparison is just lame as a fast move.

Its Community Day Move is Moonblast, which gives Altaria a strong Fairy move. However, well, Altaria already had a fairy move, Dazzling Gleam. Moonblast is better than Dazzling Gleam in most ways. It also deals more damage than Dragon Pulse does, while having more uses. So we now have an even better PvP king. Altaria didn’t really need a boost, but it got one anyway.

I suppose on the plus side, it didn’t get a super strong coverage move or something.

Its Mega is confusing.

Moonblast does one more thing. It gives Mega Altaria a better STAB fairy move. But the problem is, Mega Altaria is all bulk and little damage. So, more realistically, you just use Mega Altaria as a buff to everyone else’s Pokemon.

At the same time, on the dragon side of things, there are better options. Mega Charizard, Garchomp and Rauquaza are all going to be options. But these options have the bonus of actually dealing more damage as well. So it’s possible that Mega Altaria will just be restricted to Fairy damage. Even then though, Mega Gardevoir is a thing.

Then again, Mega Evolutions overall are kinda niche. Still, a fairly cheap Mega Evolution isn’t too bad, I guess.

I guess Swablu wasn’t popular enough though, since it was a last minute announcement.

Normally the announcements for Community Days and special moves are way in advance. Swablu was last minute on both, although it did come with Mega Altaria. So I don’t think the turnout for this one was predicted to be huge.

On the flip side, June’s Community Day was announced BEFORE May’s had even started. For June, we’ll be getting Gible Community Day, and people are going to go HARD for that one.