Every time a new Pokémon game comes out, Shiny Hunters ask if you can find rare monsters sporting color variations. Folks were even asking about Shiny monsters in Pokémon Sleep, a sleep tracking app that lets you collect Pokémon when you go to bed on time. Well, it looks like a brand new way of hunting for these variants is about to pop up, as players have discovered Pokémon Champions will sometimes give you a Shiny Pokémon to recruit. But please, if you’re going to grind for these, do it in any other game.
Getting new Pokémon in Champions isn’t as simple as running into a patch of tall grass and crossing your fingers that you find the one you want like in the RPGs. Each day, you’re able to “recruit” a Pokémon from a random line-up. You can temporarily recruit them for free, or use in-game currency to add them to your team permanently. Fans have found that yes, some of these choosable Pokémon can show up in their Shiny form.
For reference, the odds of a Pokémon spawning in this alternate form is one in 4096, with some items and tricks that can increase that rate being added over the course of the series. Champions, meanwhile, doesn’t have any of those helpful tools, and you can’t even “hunt” for a specific monster, as the ones you’re allowed to recruit are mostly random, unless you redeem tickets that make certain types more likely to show up. So not only are the Shiny odds themselves at play, you’re rolling the dice on whether the specific monster you want is even going to show up.
The roster of recruitable Pokémon changes each day, unless you use Quick Coupons or Victory Points to re-roll. So not only is Shiny hunting time-consuming in Champions, it’s expensive if you want to cycle through more than one group of Pokémon a day. The wrinkle to all of this is that, should you find a Shiny Pokémon in Champions, you can’t take them to other games. Pokémon you recruit in the game are nontransferable to Pokémon Home, which means that they will be stuck in the battle sim forever, unless Game Freak and company patch that restriction out. So while you should probably grab any Shiny that shows up in your recruitment cycles, because they do seem to be as rare as they’ve ever been, maybe save yourself the headache of making Champions your primary Shiny hunting game. Still, I would not be surprised if we hear that some very determined player has completed a Shiny Pokédex in Champions years down the line. Shiny collectors remain the sickest among us.