You NEED to finish the “An Inter-egg-sting Development” Research!

After months of staying in hiding, Giovanni is back with a new plan. There are new shadow eggs that contain… honestly pretty basic Pokemon, and we need to, uh, liberate them from Team Rocket! Alongside these new eggs, we have a new special research! And unlike the old Team Rocket special researches, this one is important. It has some pretty damn good rewards.

But you gotta work for them.

I’m gonna cut to the chase. You can’t miss out on these rewards.

The new special research gives two things: Firstly, at the very end of the research, it gives you an Elite Charge TM. These are rare and expensive as fuck. The only other way to obtain them is by getting to rank 7 in the Go Battle League. You can get an Elite Charge TM once every other season, as these tend to alternate. Or you can buy one for $12 on Community Days.

Very expensive.

The second thing is that you get a Super Rocket Radar. And you need to get this at least before December, so you can obtain a Shadow Mewtwo. At least, for a limited time.

Mewtwo is the best generalist in the game. Shadow Mewtwo is better.

Mewtwo is an insanely powerful glass cannon, with a wide range of abilities that make him competitive, even without STAB (Same Type Attack Bonus) on those moves. Shadow Mewtwo takes the glass cannon a step further by having 20% more attack, with a downside of 20% less defense. But Mewtwo always had shit defense anyway, so you basically have this super powerful beast that’s in your reach.

Now, it’s unlikely you will get an amazing Shadow Mewtwo. But a Shadow Mewtwo does 20% more damage than a normal Mewtwo. And in the places where you’d use a Mewtwo, namely raids, the downsides of less defense hardly matter. After all, a raid boss’s charge attack will still hit like a truck, even if you manage to dodge it. So a Shadow Mewtwo will do a ton of work, and you can use it to bolster your other Mewtwos and psychic types.

But you can also use Mewtwo as a generalist in other raids as well. While a Mewtwo with fire moves isn’t that strong, it’s a top-10 Ice type and can actually make damn good use of Focus Blast. It’s also one of the best Normal types as well with Hyper Beam, trailing behind the monster that is Regigigas. Sadly, Shadow Mewtwo is too glassy for PvP, but there is probably a niche team build somewhere for him.

It’s insanely expensive, but you should do it anyway.

Shadow Mewtwo’s downsides are pretty heavy. The one you’ll get from Giovanni will have random IVs (although not as random as the original shadow Legendary Birds) and it will only be level 8 or level 13. This means that Shadow Mewtwo is going to be incredibly expensive to power up. Oh, and it’ll have Frustration, but I guess that’s what the Elite TM is for. You can just wait for an event where you can use normal TMs to remove Frustration, but who knows when we’ll have another one of those events. A second move for Shadow Mewtwo also is an option. However, that will cost you 120,000 stardust and 120 Mewtwo candy.

But you don’t need to immediately power up your Shadow Mewtwo. You just need to get one in the first place. You can work on making it good, giving it a second move, powering it up later. Consider it a side project, while you do other things.

There’s another reason why you want to do this research right now.

The last reason is that we have a Team Rocket event right now. We have balloons spawning every 3 hours instead of every 6 hours. And the research requires a LOT of Team Rocket Leader battles. Not only do we have more balloons, but Pokestop Rockets are more common too.And to make things even easier, the current lineups for Team Rocket Leaders are actually far, far easier than previous ones, so you can get them done even with sub-optimal Pokemon. I managed to beat Sierra with a level 30 account using just a Dialga, despite having no super-effective damage.

Also, more importantly, these new eggs need 12km to walk. So you might as walk your inevitable Trubbish now during an event that has 1/4 walking distances. 3km for what will almost certainly be a Trubbish is far, far better than 12km.

So yeah, get out there and catch your Shadow Mewtwo, before it’s too late!