What To Do With A Master Ball in Pokemon GO?

Pokemon GO has finally decided to give us a Master Ball, tied to the Let’s GO special research that Professor Willow has been hinting at all season. The Master Ball is a Pokeball that never misses and has a 100% chance to catch whatever Pokemon it is thrown at. However, the Master Ball has been hidden in the game code for a very long time, almost as far back as Pokemon GO’s beginnings. After all these years, we will finally be getting the most powerful Pokeball.

But there’s a few things to think about here. After all, Master Balls are insanely rare. In the main series games, you can only ever have one Pokeball, without using glitches or cheats. In the very first games, you could use a somewhat complicated technique to not only find MissingNo. but you can also duplicate the amount of items in a specific space in your bag. And later games could be hacked to give extra items, particularly Master Balls, to both themselves and Pokemon shoved into Wonder Trades. But really, there’s only ever supposed to be one Master Ball, and you only ever get one shot.

So what Pokemon do you try and catch then? After all, there’s only one ball and there are a lot of Pokemon. The most obvious answer here is to use the Master Ball to catch a 100% Legendary Pokemon. As someone who has lost a hundo from a raid more than once, I’d happily use a Master Ball to catch it. Well, it does depend on the Pokemon though. I’d rather try my luck first with normal premier balls and save the master ball until the end. And even then, is it worth using the Master Ball on something like a Tapu Fini, which doesn’t have much use? And, of course, the other big potential Pokemon are the Galarian Birds from incense, which are nigh impossible to catch. But, again, do people want to catch an almost certainly 0-2-star Pokemon that will eventually appear in normal raids or with shiny forms? It’s a tough question.

In Pokemon GO though, there are plans for there to be more than one Master Ball. In the announcement that revealed Master Balls coming soon, we were told that we’d definitely get one from the Let’s GO special research, and that there would be other ways to get a Master Ball in the future. This is quite curious because most of the main games give you one and that’s it. Then again, in Pokemon GO, there are a lot more ways of getting Legendary Pokemon, rather than the singular Legendary Pokemon you see in the main games. In any main series game, you can also always reset and avoid using a Master Ball entirely. For Pokemon GO, catching a Pokemon is much more spur of the moment, and it’s also much easier to lose a Legendary. Well, aside from the Legendary Doggos from gen2.

The bigger question then is how many Master Balls can we get in Pokemon GO, and how long will it take between getting new Pokeballs? Will we get one once a season? Once a year? Will they be in the shop for €20? Who knows? But the very fact that we’ll be able to get more does make using the first Master Ball less painful…