Slowpoke Community Day

Community days are always fun, and this is no real exception. Slowpoke is a pretty cute Pokemon (and one of my brother’s favourites) so it’s nice to get something a bit different.

Cute little things

Both forms of Slowpoke are adorable and a bit useless. Their evolutions on the hand are a bit more interesting. Mainly because they’re being bitten by another Pokemon. It’s almost as parasitic as Paras and Parasect. Anyway there’s plenty of both. The Kanto Slowpoke’s shiny is rather faint, but the Galarian Slowpoke goes yellow all over. If you know me well enough, you can recall that I love yellow.

The evolutions, all four of them, are a bit better. They all look fine, with Slowbro looking the best.

However, what’s also nice for the Slowpoke family is that they’re actually getting a good move. Evolve one of the Slows and they will learn the move Surf. This move is really good for PvP, where you often need fast-charging moves. Surf has always been a great option on many a Pokemon, most recently on Kyogre before it got Origin Pulse. The SLowpoke family generally has quite high bulk, leaning on the defensive side, so having a strong STAB (same type attack bonus) water move really gives them a chance to shine.

Unfortunately, none of the Slowpoke family is any good for PvE. Because they are more defensive than offensive, they just don’t do enough damage to be considered for raids. Even Mega Slowbro has this problem. As a water type, Swampert and Blastoise are far better, and as a psychic type, it kinda works, but there are still other options, like Latios and Latias, which do more damage and have more resistances.

Pain in the ass for evolving

The bigger problem here is getting one of everything. You need two king rocks to evolve both forms of Sloking, and you need to catch poison types to evolve the Galarian Slowbro. Although to be fair, that was changed to catching 30 psychic types during the event. Still, I don’t like having a random buddy that I don’t particularly like, just to evolve it. I’m too busy walking a second Groudon for the mega candy.

What I really don’t get though is why Geodude’s community day was only for the Alolan version. The Slowpoke Community Day proves that you can have both types of Pokemon spawning in the wild, much like the Sandshrew update did.

After the event, we saw blue raid eggs, featuring Slowpoke. These level 4 raids need more than one player, and after beating them, they spawn more Slowpokes. However, by the time we were finished, we didn’t really need even more Slowpokes.

Overall, it was a good community day, even if I didn’t get many shinies. I did however get a nice pair of shoes, so all’s well.