The Community Day to end all Community Days is here in Pokémon GO. It’s time for players to start hunting a mass of Eevees, trying not just to snag one shiny for a cool evolution, but multiple, given that Eevee currently evolves into five different Pokémon, Jolteon, Vaporeon, Flareon, Espeon and Umbreon, with two more to follow soon (very soon) in Gen 4, Glaceon and Leafeon.
All the Eevee evolution possibilities make shiny hunting this Community Day a bit more complicated. Niantic knows you’ll want more shiny Eevees than normal, which is why Pokémon GO has made two three-hour blocks on both Saturday and Sunday (2-5 PM ET) for six total hours of hunting.
The problem here is that Eevee evolutions are random for three of the five, Jolteon, Vaporeon and Flareon. That means that using math, you can see how bad of a time you’re going to have trying to evolve the shinies you want, specifically if you want all three. If you Evolve three shiny Eevees, there’s only a 22% chance you’ll get all three different evolutions. It takes nine shiny Eevees to make that chance go up to 90%, and 14-15 to make it go to 99%.
Normally players are trying to just land one shiny for an evolution, but this many? That’s daunting, particularly if the odds remains the 3-5% spawn rate for shinies that we usually see. If with double the days, it’s still quite a prospect.
The above does not also factor the additional two shiny Eevees you need to save in order to manually evolve shiny Umbreon and shiny Espeon. To do that, remember you need to walk 10 km Eevee as your buddy, then evolve in day (Espeon) or night (Umbreon). On top of this, because who knows when you’ll see this many Eevees again, you may want to save at least two more for Gen 4’s shiny Glaceon and Leafeon, which may be arriving in a matter of days or weeks. But from what we know right now, unless Pokémon GO introduces evolution stones at last, they may also be random evolutions, taking your evolve chance down from 33% to 20%.
There is one bit of good news in all this mess of probabilities however, trading is now in the game at long last. If you have friends playing Pokémon GO that are also hunting and evolving Eevees on Community Day, you could turn your bad luck into a mutual benefit. If you evolve three shiny Eevees and end up with double Vaporeon, swap one with your buddy who has double Jolteon, and you can both complete your free set. The more friends you have, the easier it will be to make this work. And you can also coax your friends into throwing you a couple spare shiny Eevees for later, if you get 2 over the weekend and they get say, 14 and luck out. Shiny trades somewhat costly, but this is the kind of thing trading was made for. Remember though, trading resets IV, so if you have a high IV evolution, you may want to hang onto it.
So, when you’re out there catching, don’t forget about three hour lures, and always have incense running at all times, as it also attracts Community Day Pokémon. Again, the current odds are that you will probably see 1 shiny Eevee in about every 25 you find, so you are going to have to catch a lot to find a pile of shinies, unless Niantic has increased the rate. You may want to consider hanging onto these Eevees in case Niantic does decide to introduce evolution stones later on so you can pick your evolution, but if they haven’t by now, I suppose it’s possible they’re never going to.
As one final piece of advice, Eevee’s special move is the normal charged move Last Resort, which will carry over to any Eevee evolved before midday on Monday. So if you don’t want that as your Eevee evolution’s charged move, you’re going to want to hold off on evolving them until that deadline passes. Just something to consider.
That’s all the advice I can give right now about this rather complicated Community Day. Happy Eevee hunting, and may you evolve everything you want perfectly.
Update: Since a lot of people are messaging me about this, yes, if you have never used this day one Eevee naming trick before, you can use it to manually evolve one of each type of Eevee. I guess I assumed two years in that everyone had used up their one shot by now, but perhaps not. So, rename your Eevee the following before evolution (again, this only works once):
Pyro: Flareon
Sparky: Jolteon
Rainer: Vaporeon
Sakura: Espeon
Tamao: Umbreon
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