Sandshrew Community Day

It’s been a while since I commented on a Community Day, but that’s mostly because, well, they’ve not been that interesting. The last Community Day before Sandshrew was Hoppip, a rather quiet little event. However, it was just before the Johto Tour, where all Johto Pokemon had their releases anyway. So, after a bunch of Johto stuff, which also comes along with Kanto stuff, you’d think we’d have a new shiny from elsewhere, right? You never know after all. There’s still a lot of Pokemon without their shinies that would work, right?

A Buggy Day

Oh look another Kanto Pokemon Community Day. Okay, to be fair, it’s half Kanto and half Alolan Sandshrew. Spawn-rates-wise, it’s a nice 50-50 split between them both, which is what I hoped for, but was also a little unexpected. However, I got quite lucky. In the rest of Europe, the spawns were mostly the Alolan Form, and the Kanto version was incredibly rare. Some people thought that the quantities would flip over halfway through, but that never happened. On top of that, there was a purchasing issue when it came to the Community Day $1 research. That and the small problem with 7km eggs not having the right Pokemon were both pretty bad, but they were fixed somewhat quickly.

As usual, New Zealand ended up with a ton of bugs as well. It’s basically a tradition now.

Another PvP Side-grade

When it comes to special moves, it’s all mostly side-grades. Not better and not worse when it comes to how many wins you can get. Having more options when it comes to PvP is nice, but since these moves will be exclusive after the Community Day, it’s worth evolving one or two just to have them. For PvP, Sandslash’s new moves don’t work for either form. Sandslash itself has no real use in PvP, and there’s plenty of better Pokemon you can use for ice, steel, rock and ground elsewhere.

We don’t even get boosted Incense spawns

This is by far the worst part of Sandshrew Community Day. Incense was nerfed recently, and now it only spawns regularly if you walk around a lot. Normal (pre-Covid) Incense spawns one Pokemon every 5 minutes now, so players hoped that the pandemic Incense would work on the community day at least. And to make matters worse, it’s been pissing on and off all day. Which means that it’s a pain in the ass to play, unless you have a full rain coat on and something to keep your phone dry. But nope, no incense for the masses. The one item that could have allowed everyone to play on a Community Day has been nerfed into oblivion.

So, overall, it’s a pretty crappy Community Day. Between the bugs and the useless Incense, I don’t even know why I bothered. And then there’s my brother, who caught 4 shinies in 10 minutes, evolved two for the move and called it a day.

In hindsight, I should have been like that too. But it took me ages to get my 4 damn shinies.