Froakie Community Day
For the second month in a row, we’ve had a Water type as our Community Day Pokemon. But for August, we got a nice treat in the form of Froakie Community Day. Froakie is a starter Pokemon that evolves into the insanely popular Greninja. You know, like the Greninja in the anime. Well, not quite, we just got normal Greninja. Which we evolved from normal Froakies.
Clearly, Niantic knew this would be a popular Community Day. We got both double stardust and double catch candy as the bonuses, which meant this event was very good for hardcore and casual players alike. Froakie has been around for a while (without its shiny) so I already had a lot of candy, enough to evolve plenty of Greninjas. We also got one extra special trade, which is kinda lame since the season already gives you two special trades. Really, it should be at least 5 on Community Days, because there’s so much trading to do. Admittedly, I had good luck and got a lucky shiny Froakie in a normal trade, which I swiftly evolved. But one extra special trade feels very cheap.
The Froakies were plentiful though. Some of the other event spawns did peak through though, I saw quite a few Machops and Bunnelbys. But the spawn density was good enough. After the main Community Day, I did see some blue 4-star raids with Frogadier, but the ones I saw would have been pointless, because there’s no spawns around them. The 4-star raids started appearing right at the end of the event. Apparently you could solo those raids, but I spent my raid passes on a shadow Articuno (brother got a second shiny shadow Articuno) and on a Passimian raid for the Pokedex entry, and I didn’t want to use a premium pass on a Frogadier.
As for the moves? Well, firstly, Greninja got Water Shruiken as a permanent fast move. It’s better than all of Greninja’s other fast moves, and this does make Greninja quite powerful. Greninja also got the typical Hydro Cannon, the charge move that all water starter Pokemon get. The two combined make Greninja quite powerful. Currently, Greninja is the most powerful non-shadow, non-legendary and non-mega water type. Which is alright. But Kyogre is still a better option, and with GO Fest coming soon, Kyogre will be available again, both normal and Primal forms. That being said, this is a good chance to get some water types if you don’t have any. Sadly those Blastoises that we caught in the Community Classic Day are now rather inferior. There’s many better options and Greninja is one of them. That is, until Primarina gets a Community Day. That being said, that’s a long way off, and Kyogre is still better.
Greninja though has a chance to remain meta-relevant in the future though. Ash Greninja may appear in Pokemon GO. While Ash Greninja is mostly an anime thing, there is a chance that our Greninjas could undergo something similar to a Mega Evolution, making it way more powerful. But that’s just speculation.
But there’s definitely one other reason to use Greninja, and it’s for the sweet sweet shiny. The black shiny just looks so damn cool. It’s just like Charizard and its shiny. Clearly someone at Gamefreak knew Greninja would be popular, and gave it an absolutely amazing shiny.
And for that alone, Froakie Community Day was worth it. Even with my low number of shinies.