Pokemon Champions Player Gets Incredibly Lucky With Their First Nontutorial Recruitment

Pokemon Champions‘ recruitment system has bestowed an incredible amount of good fortune on one player, who managed to pull not only a fan-favorite starter, but a shiny one, on their first post-tutorial attempt. Shines have been showing up in Pokemon games ever since they started coming out in color, but actually getting one in Pokemon Champions isn’t as simple as it is in many other Pokemon games.

Released on April 8 for Nintendo Switch, and with a mobile release date expected later in 2026, Pokemon Champions is a free-to-start strategic monster arena battler, eschewing much of the plot-heavy and exploration elements of mainline games in the franchise. Drawing early comparisons to the Pokemon Stadium series, Pokemon Champions lets players import Pokemon from other games, using the Pokemon Home app as a digital hub, but it also offers players the ability to find some Pokemon natively in the game and add them to teams.

Pokemon Champions Gets Incredibly Lucky with First Recruitment

Shiny Pokemon can also be encountered in Pokemon Champions via an in-game recruitment system, and at least one player has been lucky enough to pull a popular shiny on their very first attempt. Reddit user GleamEyesLuxray recently shared an image of their first recruitment pull, which gave them a shiny Decidueye, the fully evolved form of the Gen 7 starter Pokemon Rowlet. The shared success has given shiny hunters a lot of hope, providing visual proof that Pokemon Champions can produce shiny Pokemon. It has been followed up by several others sharing images of shiny versions of Tyrantrum, Sylveon, Mimikyu, Corviknight, Gourgeist, Toxapex, and more, at least one of which was reported as being encountered on a player’s first post-tutorial recruitment.

Players looking to get more Pokemon in Pokemon Champions without importing them from other games really only have one option, which is to visit the Recruit Ranch. There, they’ll have a once-daily free encounter, choosing between three randomly selected Pokemon from a pool that is expected to rotate once every few months. Players will know that one of the Pokemon concealed by tall grass at the ranch will be shiny from a sparkling animation that appears around its hiding spot.

Image via The Pokemon Company

It’s not yet known exactly how likely players are to encounter a shiny Pokemon when performing a recruitment action in Pokemon Champions. The Pokemon Company hasn’t made this information public, and there are seemingly no reliable datamining reports, likely because the rotating selection of available Pokemon is handled via a server and not naturally embedded into the game’s coding. In most Pokemon games, the rates for encountering a shiny are one in 4,096, or around 0.024 percent. However, the increased regularity with which players are reporting encountering shinies in Pokemon Champions is leading some to believe it follows something closer to the shiny encounter rate formula of Pokemon GO, which, outside special Pokemon and event days, places its odds at one in 512, or just a hair under 0.2 percent.

This higher encounter rate theory might make sense for the new game, as the way it’s set up, there is no way to activate traditional shiny hunting tricks in Pokemon Champions, like the Masuda Method of breeding or using the PokeRadar to chain together encounters with the same species of Pokemon back-to-back. Those hoping to get lucky while searching at the Recruit Ranch should be aware that in addition to the shiny bush animation, there’s another one that shows sparkling bubbles. These bubbles don’t indicate the presence of a shiny, but of a Pokemon with a special title or mark.