Wonder Box, The Fun Feature Pokemon GO Lacks

When I installed Pokemon Home on my phone, I realized that something was missing. Not from Pokemon Home, but from Pokemon GO.

You see, Pokemon Home isn’t really a game. It’s more of a storage area for Pokemon, like a second PC. Unlike a PC though, you can bring a lot more into your Pokemon Home account, and it has some backwards compatibility. You can even send Pokemon from Pokemon GO to Pokemon Home, but you can’t send it back to Pokemon GO later.

Something lacking…

Anyway, I quickly found what I felt Pokemon GO lacked, and that was trading. There IS trading in Pokemon GO, but it’s very strict on how you trade. You can trade one Pokemon at a time, and a traded Pokemon can’t be traded back. The oddest thing though is that, in Pokemon GO, the Pokemon you trade has its IVs scrambled. So you have a chance at better stats. We also have a separate mechanic called Lucky Pokemon. To get a Lucky Pokemon, you just have to rely on luck alone.

In Pokemon Home on the other hand, you have multiple ways of trading, and pretty much every Pokemon in Home is tradable in some way. If you want something in particular, using GTS, you can select what you want traded to you, and your Pokemon in the GTS will stay there until someone offers what you want. Room trades on the other hand are a bit more random: everyone throws in a Pokemon they don’t want, the Pokemon are all mixed up and you get a random Pokemon from someone else in the room.

Of course, there are normal trades as well. Just trade one to one and get what you want.

The most random and curious of trades though is the Wonder Box. In Pokemon Home, you select 3 Pokemon and put them in the Wonder Box. At some point in the near future, you can come back to the Wonder Box and see which randomly chosen Pokemon you got.

People put all sorts into Wonder Boxes.

The fun thing about Wonder Trades is that you never know what you might get. You could get a level 5 Caterpie or a level 100 Metagross. Or anything in between. It’s all random. Made more random by how many players we have both in Home and GO.

Most likely though, if we ever did get Wonder Boxes in Pokemon GO, there would be some limitations on what you can throw into a Wonder Trade. And they’ll most likely be time-gated, the same way Meltan boxes are. I also doubt they’d allow us to throw Mythical Pokemon into a Wonder Box.

They’d only get deleted anyway.

Some may argue that a Wonder Box area is a waste of time. They assume they’ll only ever get Pidgeys and Caterpies. Or whatever Pokemon is in the latest event that they have too many of. But if you are going to delete these Pokemon anyway, why not throw them into a Wonder Box? You may get something really cool. I mean, probably not, but still, the chance is there.

Sure, it’s a massive gamble, but if it’s a Pokemon you were only going to transfer, why not do a wonder trade? Maybe someone out there does actually want your level 31 Rattata. You never know.

Sadly, this is just wishful thinking.

While I would adore a Wonder Box mechanic in Pokemon GO, I don’t think we’ll ever get one. Niantic are very stubborn when it comes with ways to trade Pokemon. They don’t want people getting, for example, regional Pokemon with ease. Instead, they want us to spend money on raid passes and incubators.

Still, I can only hope…