I hope you and the family have a joyous Johto Tour Lony.

So for all my other PokeBros out there, Johto Tour has been and gone and what an event it was.

12 straight hours of Pokemon madness, all dedicated to arguably the most revered entries in the series Gold and Silver. Ask any hardcore fan, an Heart Gold/Soul Silver is universally praised as the best in the series with Black 2/White 2 being it's main opposition.

You must be thinking, 12 hours of Pokemon? What could possibly be so enticing to get somebody to play a pay to win app for twelve hours?

Like it's predecessor the Kanto Tour, Johto Tour tried to mirror it's game as best as possible. For free to play players aka me, that consisted of two challenges.

The first was going through all the gym leaders before facing the Leader of your respective House (Valor etc.). At random PokeStops, you'd see NPCs hanging out and you'd have to battle them to collect their badges. They were all themed on the Gold/Silver gyms so Flying, Bug, Normal, Ghost, Fighting, Steel, Ice and Dragon. Strangely enough, these guys were actually fairly uncommon, I thought they'd constantly be in your business, blocking you from accessing Stops. I guess Niantic took on last year's feedback where these guys were everywhere and were constantly blocking spawns. Good luck trying to catch anything in one of those insane blocks of PokeStops.

Everytime you defeated a gym leader you were rewarded with items and Pokemon. One of them included the regional Pokemon Heracross which saved yours truly a raid pass. Once you defeated all the gym leaders and the leader of your house, you got a special encounter with the legendary dog that matched your house. As a Team Valor player, that meant Entei.

Speaking of Entei, the other task of the day was hunting down the roaming dogs. Like the Generation 2 games, these guys could be found out in the wild but were insanely difficult to catch. The object was to take a photo of them and then you'd get the opportunity to catch them via research making it much easier. They were relatively rare spawns, you may find one for about 30 seconds but you'd have to be quick to click on it. That task saved me three raid passes, so kudos to Niantic again.

Meanwhile raids were constantly spawning. Raids were constantly spawning every 30 minutes, so you'd have a 25 minute window to catch a Pokemon and then a 5 minute break where you'd see the egg. The raid exclusive monsters were Lugia, Ho-Oh, Corsola and Unown.

Just like last year, spawns were in one hour rotation based on various regions it went something like this

9am - New Bark - Chikorita, Meganium, Cyndaquill, Typhlosion, Totodile, Feraligator, Sentret, Hoothoot, Hoppip Eevee, Espeon, Umbreon
10am - Violet City - Golbat, Crobat, Slowpoke, Slowking, Togetic, Natu, Xatu, Mareep, Ampharos, Yanma, Wooper, Murkrow
11am - National Park - Gloom, Bellossom, Scyther, Scizor, Sudowoodo, Sunkern, Sunflora, Girafarig, Pineco, Forrtress, Shuckle, Chinchou
12pm - Goldenrod City - Chansey, Blissey, Porygon, Porygon2, Marill, Azumarill, Aipom, Wobafett, Snubbull, Remoraid, Octillery, Miltank
1pm - Mt Silver - Onix, Steelix, Sneasal, Misdreavus, Houndour, Houndoom, Seadra, Kingdra, Slugma, Larvitar, Tyranitar

In general Qwilfish, Dunsparce, Stantler and Hitmontop were spawning through out but were pretty rare spawns. I saw more Piplups than any of those monsters, and it's not even available in Australia at the moment.

It made for a very frantic, but enjoyable day. After 1pm, the rotation repeated and then the final two hours was a free for all with every spawn available.

As far as my own experience...

Brisbane is currently dealing with it's worst flood since 2010, so my original plans had to be completely changed. In the end, I booked it to the city since so much of the event required walking around so I endured the long commute and the conditions to play the game.

The first order of business was to hatch all the egg Pokemon. I needed four of them - Cleffa, Smoochum, Tyrogue and Igglybuff. This is something I'd been planning since Christmas where I ended up hoarding all the free incubators and started amassing 2KM eggs just to make hatching easier. I was able to do this in about two hours, with Tyrogue popping up right as the Mt Silver hour was winding down.

As far as raids go, the first thing I did on the day was organise a Ho-Oh raid. I mega evolved an Aerodactly assembled a team and watched the group get filled within 10 seconds. Then braving the conditions, the app crashed twice and in the end only two others ended up answering the call. We still managed to topple it but I was not off to a good start. Fortunately the field research rewards took a lot of the stress out of raids, so I just organised a Corsola raid online and raided Unown with a few people online.

Outside of that, I treated the day similarly to the wrap up Community Day where I specifically hunted down Gibles. Each hour had a spawn or two I was after and I was constantly on the move looking for them. If I had a second, I'd try to fast catch something but I wasn't going through each cluster. I was mainly after Larvitar because of it's event day move and I have a couple of Shadows that needed some investment. I didn't quite get to 1600 like I did with Gible, settling for 500 candy

The Pokemon that I was after...

Sentret (just for the Furret Dex entry, took care of that first thing), Chikorita, Eevee, Togetic, Wooper, Chinchou, Sudowoodo, Snubbull, Marill, Larvitar and Sneasal.

I'd say the highlight was a high level Tyranitar in the wild (saved me 125+ candy right there) and a bunch of shinies. I wasn't really hunting but ended up with 2 x Scyther, Chinchou, Chansey, Misdreavus, Raikou and Onyx.

Before I left, even though I already have one, the day didn't feel complete until I did a Lugia raid. So I made the trek towards the Botannical Gardens, organised a party through a raid and then a bunch of people joined making for an easy 10 person raid. By this point catching Pokemon was really difficult since I was constantly having to dry the screen with my shirt, so the Lugia came down to two balls before I was able to land it.

Ultimately I completed my goal, but something was missing. I didn't really walk away with too many PVP Pokemon. So right as the event was wrapping up, I was able to get two really good Chinchou and Eevee spawns. I've just been testing them out and damn the difference a meta level team makes to PVP. I had to get in early since I needed 5 more rare candies to evolve my last shadow larvitar before the event ended and I did that in two sets.

So all in all, really happy with the day and I'm glad I made lemonade out of lemons.

Generation 7 is live on Pokemon Go.

Today was the launch of the Alolan tour where a bunch of new seasonal spawns, perks, raids, egg pools etc. were rolled out.

Once again Niantic have decided to roll out only a few Pokemon to begin with.

Appearing in the wild we have: Rowlet, Litten, Popplio, Pikipek and Yungoos. As a rare 10km hatch we have the pseudo legendary Jangmo-o and in raids/eggs we have Rockruff. Tapu Koko (Electric/Fairy) is the five-star raid legendary and Comfey is a regional exclusive native to Hawaii.

From my experience, Popplio was by far the most common starter and I encountered over 10 times the amount of Popplio over Rowlet. I wonder if it's because I chose Squirtle as my starter all those years ago? I live in a more woodsy area so I would have thought Rowlet would have been more common. I haven't done any Rockruff raids nor attempted any 10km eggs since I'm still hatching everything from Johto Tour but I will get on that at some point.

I have done two Tapu Koko raids which is pretty easy since it's weak to Mega Beedrill which is the most accessible mega evo. Mega Beedrill, Excadrill and my 4 Garchomps allow me to make very short work of it. Also the two free local raid passes are the month long perk. Incense has also been tweaked. It now lasts for 90 minutes, but you have to be in motion for it to trigger new spawns. Otherwise if you're stationary the rate is much slower.

Other spawns I'm noticing: Pidgey, Wurmple, Chinchou, Mareep, Exeggcute, Growlithe, Magnemite, Cherrim, Pinsir, Horsea, Ducklet, Krabby, Tentacool, Slowpoke, Jigglypuff have all entered the spawn pool.

Other notes: Johto Tour was criticised by ticket holders for being too difficult. They had to complete collection challenges within the twelve hour period to collect Celebi. Miss just one Pokemon and they couldn't get their full ticket. Considering Brisbane received over a 1000mm of rain this past week, fans have been lodging refund requests to Niantic.

Taiwan and Mexico both had in-person events that was themed around Kanto. These included raids for the legendary birds and the region exclusive monsters. I actually signed up to reddit, joined a Discord and spent ages trying to get my PlayStore app to work so I could download Genie (I think Chrome and another Android app was causing problems?). I got in on a Moltres raid early, but the other invite was to the wrong regional (Kangaskhan when I already have so many including a shiny variant) so I had to wait a few hours on Monday morning to finally get Tauros. I made a thread and everything, it was ignored, someone else made one about 10 minutes and got a response and I desperately hit the guy up to get an invite. I got my Tauros, leaving only Mewtwo as the one Kanto mon I need.

I'm officially burned out on Go Battle League. I did all 20 sets back to back, throwing battles to the point my ELO was in the 800s and they were struggling to find some opponents so bad. I decided to speed it up so I went on a 20+ streak, and have been taking turns going 3/5 and 2/5 to keep my ELO around here. I caught a couple more Deoxys this way.

I'm going to be taking it easier over the coming days. Tomorrow is raid hour, so I'll go out around then, host a few raids and call it a day. If I do play the other days, they'll be shorter walks and not full on sessions, I need to unplug a little.

Huge Pokemon Go news.

Emperor and I are no longer Pokemon Go friends. That's right, I've culled over 200 friends since loading the list up was a nightmare and you were one of them. Actually if you ever get back into the game after a certain amount of time, the friendship levels reset so it's an extra 60K EXP right off the bat. I'll continue to collect post-cards of power-poles just for you.

Actually it's been really quiet on the app. It only took me a couple of sessions to capture all the new wild alolan Pokemon and nobody wanted to do Tapu Koko raids after the first few days. Everyone just wants the 1-star Rockruff raids and they're pretty uncommon. On Sunday we had the monthly community day which was the Kanto and Alolan versions of Sandshrew. It's a fairly useless monster but I got a few shinies, a hundo and a couple of PVP compatible monsters just in-case.

The first real event just launched which was the Season of Colours. It features the debut of Oricorio which has four different forms which all differ according to the region. In Australia we get the Pa'u version which is the Psychic variant where as the Americas receive Pom Pom and the UK gets Baile. Thunderus has entered the raids which is a new legendary for me and spawns include Gligar, Drowzee, Slugma, Turtwig, Fletching etc. The only Pokemon I'm really hunting is Gligar since I still need Gliscor and I'm only one capture away from being able to get the evolution. I was able to get a shiny Gligar which was a pretty neat surprise and I've caught around three shinies for the event in Fletching and Horsea.

Also the other day I was able to get my first Shadow Shiny in Bagon. Pretty sweet to have a green dinosaur and it has decent enough IVs as well.

I'm looking forward to the March 22nd event, the Lush Jungle. We should see a few more Pokemon make their debut in Fomatis, Morelull, Bounsweet, Oranguru, Passimian and Tapu Lele. I reckon Oranguru and Passimian will be region specific Pokemon with each spawning in different hemispheres.

Otherwise it's been a sleepy couple of weeks since the Johto Tour. It's been nice to spend less on the app and set smaller goals like hunting Gligars or doing Rockruff raids.

Pokemon Go update

The Lush Jungle event launch and despite my wild predictions, naturally only one new Pokemon line started spawning in Fomantis. That's fine and I was able to evolve it in one session, it seemed a lot more common than Gligar which was a welcome surprise. Tapu Lele is also in raids and is a lot tougher than expected. The best counters are Mega Metagrosses with their legacy move, but I'm still waiting for a TM off Frustration event and a way to teach them that move so I'm stuck with Mega Beedrill, Chandelure (x2), Genesect and Gengar (x2). I'm wiping out at least twice, so not a walk in the park so Tapu Koko. At least there's some interest, no one wanted a bar of Tornadus.

Lush Jungle came with two special research quest-lines which I've completed. Rewards included a Charged TM, A Mossy Lure among others. Otherwise it's a sleepy event, I'm taking a few days off from playing and when I do play I'm mostly focusing on Paras' and Ferroseed's.

Next month's community day was just announced with Stufull making it's debut. It's a 400 Candy evolution, but thankfully the event is double candy. However, Niantic has made the move to half CDs into 3 hour spurts. It seems like a really odd decision, but they want more players to play at the same time so they want it to be more concentrated.

So the past week was the Team Rocket event. Each Rocket member gets new line-ups which means new possible shadows. More importantly, you can TM frustration off a shadow Pokemon and make them viable battle Pokemon. I've been saving up TMs for this event so I went crazy building up a team of Shadow Machamps, Shadow Mamoswines, Shadow Salamences and Shadow Metangs. Unfortunately for the last two I may have to wait until next year's Hoenn Event to cash in and learn their legacy moves.

In the mean time, today was the return of Community Day Classic with Mudkip making an appearance. Swampert is basically the best water monster in Raids and PVP, so I went crazy playing the full three hours and collecting 2700 pieces of candy in the process. The key was getting a few PVP Pokemon so I used the IV String generator and ended up with exactly what I wanted. Now I've got three Shadow Swamperts for raids, one Master League Swampert which will also act as the Mega version when that gets released as well as two Great League and Ultra League contenders.

Coming up we have the Easter event. The spawns aren't anything too great with the Nidorans and rare Togetic being the only out of season Pokemon spawning. The big focus is egg hatching with 1/2 hatch distance and some really good 2KM eggs. Namely Riolu who is usually only found in 10KM eggs. We also have a new raid spawn in Tapu Bulu and special research which I always like for the dopamine hit. There's also a special grass event taking place next Saturday from 11-2pm followed by the Snubbul Community Day which will be it's debut.

Next month will see the final island guardian Tapu Fini make their Pokemon Go debut and I'd imagine we'll see the cover legendaries Solgaleo and Lunala come into close out the Season of Alola. I did forget to mention that Salandit also made it's Go debut, but it's only available as a rare hatch in 12km eggs, so it's difficult to come by. Especially since you need the female version to evolve and that's a 12% spawn rate.

The Stufful Community Day was on Saturday which was a nice 2 in 1 for trainers, not only providing all the perks of a CD but also a debut of a brand new Pokemon line for the game. Stufful is a similar type of Pokemon as Magikarp, Swablu, Noibat, Wailmer etc. where it requires 400 Candy to evolve, which translates roughly to 130 catches. There was a lot of anxiety in the community over being able to hit that target but Niantic came to the table with double catch candy. On top of that, there was field research that rewarded 20 lots of candy for tasks like Catch 3 Stufful or Use A Pinap Berry so it was extremely easy to be rolling in the candy. In the first 20 minutes of play, I had over 800 candy.

Running concurrently was a limited time event where Niantic would plant at least one tree for every km walked up to 5km. To signify this, each km was rewarded with a Cherubi encounter. This presented an issue as Niantic included a lot of Walk 1KM field research into their tasks, diluting the pool for the easier CD style tasks.

It was largely business as usual except for one small thing. One of the perks was the higher chance of accumulating XL candy, so this was the perfect chance to get 296 candy aka the amount you need to hit max level. I played relatively normally to begin with, even taking time out to clear out my backlog of field research rewards to make use of the double catch candy reward. However when I realised I had only half the amount of XL with an hour to go I basically power-walked the last hour going rapid fire on the catches. In the end I just made it with 305 candy after transferring all the Stufful I had accumulated.

Otherwise it's Sustainability Week. Grimer, Trubbish, Oddish, Cherubi, Turtwig, Grotle, Ferroseed and making it's debut Oranguru are the common spawns. Venusaur and Phantump are the rare spawns with Larvitar and Alolan Diglett in 7KM eggs. There's also nice 50 Mega Energy reward tasks for Abomasnow and Venusaur making their Mega Forms easily attainable and the game gifted a Mossy Lure module and made the Collection Challenge based on using it (I haven't bothered since it requires sticking around one place for an hour).

We should get a road map for next month's upcoming events in the coming days. I hope they theme it on Poni Island from the Sun and Moon games. The spawns aren't that amazing but if they make Jangmo-o more accessible and theme it around releases like that (Dragon/Dinosaur) or Mudbray (Ground/Rock) it would be worth it for me.

After a relatively quiet week on the app, Niantic just revised the Mega Evolution system.

Mega Evolutions have been under fire and have a reputation for being more trouble than their worth. Niantic has attempted to make them more applicable by giving trainers the ability to mega evolve their monsters again for free. The feature is now based on a cool down feature where the price drops continuously until it becomes free after 7 days.

On top of that, trainers have the ability to shorten that cool-down to just 3 days if they continuously mega evolve the same Pokemon. There's other perks and quality of life changes as well but on the whole they've made Mega Evolutions more useful.

Then to usher the new changes in, Niantic shadow dropped a new event called Mega Moments. Every Mega Energy is available through field research, so it's a fantastic event to stock up on Mega Energy. They're pretty generous, especially with some rewards gifting players 70 Mega Energy. It's been pretty handy for me so far and all I need now is some Mega Gengar energy to have the entire pool.

Furthermore they've debuted the Mega form of Kangaskan. This Pokemon is typical exclusive to Australia, so it's a pretty good opportunity for trainers to get that dex entry. As an Australian this isn't quite as appealing but as a completionist the opportunity to have all the mega forms has made it a priority. Niantic plans on having a Raid Day on Sunday where trainers can collect 5 in-person raid passes.

Suffice to say I went hard on this event.

Across 3 days I walked 40kms, including in the drizzling rain in the last day while finding time to get some Mega Kangaskan raids in there. As it turns out, it was fortunate I made the extra effort because the app was stingey with the Gengar field research. I just had enough to get the evolution in and I know the majority came from detours I typically don't make even when I really dive into the app. The final day wasn't really worth it since I already had plenty of energy. However I did need to do two Mega Kanga raids and as it turned out I had to get in early because the raid apps went crazy with trainers opening 1000s of raid lobbies. I got in just before the rush, got 3 more raids in before it just became a waste of time.

I was planning on taking it easy this week but with Mega Latias and Latios coming out soon for a very limited time and both requiring a number of raids to complete I'll be back at it from Tuesday. The annoying thing is, they're meant to be the toughest raids yet and the best Mega counter is Gengar, so I may have to walk further just to get enough energy reserves to give myself the best shot.

Mega Latias and Mega Latios debuted in raids on Tuesday. They're a part of the new Tier 6 raids, a more challenging tier that requires 8+ trainers to defeat.

Since you can only invite five trainers at a time, this presents a big issue. The idea is that you're meant to go to the city and work with other trainers in person but that's far from ideal for most players.

There are work-arounds but they're not for the weak of heart. The most cost-friendly is setting up lobbies via Discord. The issue is if you're like me, you're completely Discord illiterate and worse my shoddy two thumb texting style needs a lot of practice. I'm like molasses typing on a phone, I don't know how some of you guys do it.

So I've attempted a few, my record currently sits at 3-2 with two horribly failed lobbies where I cost other trainers their hard earned remote raid pass. I genuinely feel awful for it, but on the flipside some others shared they got a shiny during my raid so that made me feel somewhat better.

However until I can get a handle on the raids, I'm not going to go hard on them like I had originally planned. It's just too stressful trying to organise and hope my phone doesn't lag trying to load my friend-list or anything like that. Fortunately I did join a Latias lobby so I have enough Mega Energy to evolve both.

I went pretty hard on the app last week.

They ran an event called Adventure Week which was a Fossil/Rock themed event with free egg incubators as a prize and then a research day. A research day is essentially where you get easy-to-complete tasks and you get a really good chance at a shiny. On it's own, it's a fun way to spend a Saturday or Sunday but with Cranidos and Shieldon on the offer it was as good as it gets. Cranidos is one of the best PVE monsters and Shieldon is a top tier Great League Pokemon so grinding those candies was well worth it.

Spawns through out the event included Kabuto, Kabutops, Omanyte, Omastar, Anorith, Armaldo, Lilleep, Cradily, Cranidos, Rampardos, Shieldon, Bastiodon, Larvitar, Pupitar, Rhyhorn, Aron and Aerodactyl. On top of that field research gave you access to Tirtuga, Archen, Tyrunt (debut) and Amaura (debut). I largely went after Cranidos but I essentially tried to catch everything I could. The main goal was to get enough candy to get an entire team into the 40s as well as get a good Bastiodon for Great League which at Rank 1 doesn't get any better. Rock is well and truly covered for so whenever any of the legendary flying types return I'm well and truly covered.

Before then it was Go Fest which was a two-day event. The first day was similar to Go Tour with rotating hourly spawns. It was kind of a pain because each hour had something I wanted. However the big ticket item was Axew which is one of the rarest spawns in the game. I was fortunate enough to catch a dozen or so including the shiny on the final hour of the event. Otherwise I was largely farming Piloswine, Larvitar, Drillbur and Meditite candy. I think I got some really good PVP Pokemon as well but I've barely touched Battle League since Adventure Week took up so much of my time.

Coming up is the TCG Cross-Over event. Mewtwo, the final Kanto monster I need, is returning to raids and the big spawn is the debut of Wimpod, which is like Gyarados where it requires 400 candy to evolve. It's a two week event, so hopefully it's a fairly common spawn and I can take care of it quickly. Otherwise it's a lot of common spawns like the Kanto starters, Pikachu, Eevee, Magikarp, Rattata etc. The only other notable spawn is Solrock and Lunatone which have been regional exclusive. Both are swapping hemispheres at the end of the month, so I can finally add Solrock to the collection.

Otherwise I've just been trying to get my daily raid in. Kyogre and Groudon, the legendary Pokemon from Ruby and Sapphire have been available and both are among the best of their typing. Personally I've always liked the design of Groudon, I think the sun-burnt Godzilla design is bad-ass so any excuse to build up a collection is fine by me.

Yeah, Adventure week was pretty good for me, as I got a couple of new shiny Pokémon, hell the past two weeks as a whole have been good for that.

Aerodactyl
Beartic
Breloom
Drapion
Gumshoos
Hitmonchan
Mantine (last night's spotlight hour)
Muk
Omastar
Seviper

Well OK, I technically caught them in their pre-evolutionary forms, but have since evolved the ones that could evolve.

Yeah even I came back for adventure week and had a blast with it - this game can be so fun when they put the effort into it. And me and the family got into a Groudon raid tonight and won. Never beat a 5 star raid in the past so that was a blast.

woah UT plays video games? wat?

My son has always been into Pokémon and got us all into Go a few years ago. I’m sporadic with it and come and go a lot but I’ve been have a ton of fun with it lately. Also helps that it rewards being active.

Not sure if you're in the loop but the legendary birds are back in raids this month KING KID.

I'm looking forward to Dialga at the end of the month as well. It's a new monster for me plus since I currently only own Shining Pearl it'll be nice to add one to that Dex.

Got my daily raids in and got some crazy luck with Mewtwo, pulling two shinies including one on the Community Day which meant I was able to get 4 times candy on it. I ended up with 17 in total and the shinies happen to be the best of the bunch.

There's a Team Rocket event about to take place which is always welcome news to me. New shadows, the ability to TM frustration away and a new shadow legendary. I'm just going to collect the radar and save it for a more viable shadow legendary which should hopefully be Rayquaza around October/November.

I haven’t really been playing it honestly. Sometimes my son randomly wants to play it so I will, but I’m definitely not on the chase for anything in it right now.

Got me so many Zapdos and Articuno's , including a shiny Zapdos this past weekend. I loved the event again , I'm really get into the battle leagues so being able to do 20 in a day instead of five left me hooked in my free time and walking around. Getting better at it finally.

Big Pete or Emperor you guys battle? I try to stick to 1500 or 2500 because I just don't have the monsters to fight in the no limit league .... yet.

When I played I got super into the Battle League. It was actually one of the reasons I quit, I got too addicted.

Like you I stuck to the Great and Ultra Leagues, I had a pretty good roster for both. Master League was too much, I tried it a couple of times and fluked a victory because everything fell in my favour, but in general I was way too underpowered.

It's super addicting for sure but so fun.

I've really started to get my roster honed in with a fluctuating third party and got double moves for all of them. I hate that the Stunfisk is so overpowered though and you almost have to guard against it every battle. I have one and it's almost a cheat code because the HP is so high and the move it so quick.

My other problem is that I never cared about it before so I didn't pay attention to my CP and a ton of my best Pokemon just edge of out the ranks.

Still found my combo of Nidoqueen(w Poison Fang & Earth Power) & Venusaur (With Sludge Bomb and Leaf Frenzy) and any number of my water ones works best. That last spot usually goes to Azumarill or Lanturn but they don't have small moves so it gets annoying sometimes.

Yeah Stunfisk is a pain in the ass. Especially the ones with two charge moves. Having a choice between Discharge and Mud Bomb wrecks pretty much everything including enemy Stunfisks.

If I recall Azumarill is one of the best water Pokemon in the lower leagues although there are other decent choices.

I had a good time with Skuntank and Pidgeot with Feather Dance. Skuntank especially wrecked a lot of Pokemon, he's a great opener. Swampert too is a badass.

Never used a Skunktank , maybe I’ll give it a try - I like to try new combinations. I like using the new Mandibuzz as my dark type - high HP and flying can be a bitch to guard against.

I like the Nidoqueen a ton only because it’s PF is quick and drops the opponents defense. Also someone almost always plays a Fairy Type so it’s a great guard against that.

I haven't played PVP since Fossil Cup where I ran a team of Araquanid/Whiscash/Registeel. Before then I played the Great League Remix where they restricted players from using the 20 most used Pokemon from the season before. I think the team was Whishcash/Vigoroth/Alolan Marowak. Usually I like to play the opening couple of weeks, collect my Elite TMs and wait until the following season.

I do collect PVP Pokemon. I'm constantly on the look-out for good IVs and cross-referencing Go Stadium to see where my Pokemon stack up. For instance tonight I went hard on the Staryu Spotlight Hour just to load up on Stardust (I think I got 400K?). Then next week we have the Meditite Spotlight Hour which I've had on my calender all week. I have a ranked 7 with 80XL, but since it's a Level 50 monster, I want that Ranked 1 and I want to get 220 more XL.

How do you deal with FOMO? The limited amount of Stardust, finite candy, monsters etc. prevents me from being too active.

If you want a spammy water type UT, consider Politoad, Whiscash or Swampert (if it has Hydro Cannon, it's Community Day/Elite Charge Move).

I can’t deal with FOMO and I also crushed the Startyu Spotlight for the Stardust. Was a little annoyed they took away the great league this week after spending so much time crafting my team but my Ultra League team is finding its groove.

Got a huge boost for it today too picking up a Cresselia (shiny) , Dialga and Darkrai.

Just took me awhile to get used to it and you HAVE to have a grass type in there to combat Swampert and my Leafeon apparently is a badass. My new favorite set is Leafeon/Dialga/Cresselia but I’ll swap Muk in as well as Moltres.

How did you and your family enjoy Go Fest Lony?

Time for an update.

This past weekend was Go Fest, a two day event that saw the global debut of Carbink, Diancie, Mega Diancie & Mega Rayquaza.

Like past events, the day was divided into hourly chunks with spawns changing with each theme.

They were:

Quartz - Lickitung, Heracross (regional), Clefairy, Miltank, Audino, Morelull, Foongus, Skitty, Quartz Pikachu, East Sea Shellos, Buneary, Whismur, Luvdisc, Wurmple
Pyrite - Timburr, Gible, Heliptile, Pyrite Pikachu, Sandshew, Alolan Diglet, Psyduck, Girafarig, Shuckle, Trapinch, Hippopotas, Joltik, Binacle, Grubbin
Malachite - Caterpie, Malachite Pikachu, Bellsprout, Scyther, Cowboy Hat Snorlax, Spinarak, Remoraid, Roselia, Snover, Cottonee, Ferroseed, Stunfisk, Fomantis, Oranguru
Aquamarine - Aquamarine Pikachu, Horsea, Lapras, Marill, Wobbuffett, Carvanha, Barboach, Bagon, Beldum, West Sea Shellos, Woobat, Tympole, Goomy, Mareanie

Tons of great spawns and it would have been an amazing event for a beginner, but I had to pick my battles. My main goal was to hunt as many Lickitungs as I could since it's a PVP staple and it rarely spawns in the wild. So I went into the city and walked all through the CBD, Botanicle Gardens and made a circuit through South Bank largely going after as many as I could. Quartz in general had the best spawns for me, with Heracross being a regional exclusive that hasn't been available in the wild for over two years, Clefable is PVP relevant and there were a ton of stardust Pokemon worth farming. So I went hard that hour, and pushed through some of Pyrite so I could finally fill the Timburr line in my dex. I also couldn't really say no to more Gibles, especially since Shadow Garchomp became available and there should be a Mega in the future.

I largely took the next two spawns off to recharge my phone. Aquamarine was the second best catchment but I had to pick my battles so I only spent about 5 minutes hunting Pokemon so I could get ready for the next Quartz catchment. Went even harder trying to get as many Lickitungs as I could and was satisfied with the 200XL candies as I was able to add before calling it a day.

Day two was all about the Mega Rayquaza raids. Mega Rayquaza is the best raid dragon/flying raid attacker in the game by far and in a nice twist they made every Rayquaza an easy catch. I'd only planned on doing about five raids before calling it, but ended up spending all my free premium passes I'd been hoarding and caught over 30+. Sadly I didn't really get an upgrade on my existing Rayquaza, so I only ended up with a solid raid attacker. I have nearly enough XLs to hit level 50 with it, but I figure I'll just power up one to Level 40 and next time Rayquaza is in raids, I can hopefully get a IV97-100.

Shiny wise, I ended up with a Lickitung, Timburr and Rayquaza. I also got a second Metorite, so I can have a second Mega Rayquaza down the line.

The big thing for the event was actually the legacy moves. After missing out on Hoenn Tour, I was finally able to mass evolve some shadow beldums and bagons I've been holding onto for over a year so I'll have stronger attackers.

All in all a good event. It's been a good month or so of PoGo with back to back weeks of Squirtle Community days (which was like a dream come true) and the return of Mega Groundon/Kyogre as well as Cresselia.

Of course the big news next month is that they're skipping Generation 8 and going straight into 9 right in time for the Scarlet and Violet DLC. I've got my fingers crossed they'll add the Ruin Pokemon into raids as I can always do with more Chien-Paos, Chi-Yus etc. for team comps.

Go Fest was for the most part great... although, I did come across a shiny Heracross, that broke put and fled after one throw, that one hurt and almost ruined the event for me (it happened 15 minutes in). I honestly have no idea if and/or when I'll ever come across another shiny Heracross, so yeah I wasn't happy about that. Still though, I got a lot of new shiny Pokemon that I didn't have before, but yeah.

My new shiny Pokemon are...

Kyorge
Helioptile
Bellsprout
Pawniard
Wobuffet
Shellos (East Sea)
Digest
Oranguru
Joltik
Goomy
Ferroseed

So def a lot of new shiny Pokemon, but still would have been awesome to have the shiny Heracross as well.

I would have been so tilted if that happened to me. Still, that's a good haul - Goomy especially was a shiny I would have been thrilled about.

Spotlight hour is 2 x transfer candy so now is a good time to dump any excess legendaries/rare Pokemon. I said goodbye to just about every Rayquaza and Kyogre I caught this week.