We have headed back to Gen 2 for this month’s Pokémon GO Community Day, and have reached the second of what will be three featured starters from the region. We already had a Chikorita Community Day previously, and now it’s Cyndaquil’s turn.
The grand bonus for this Community Day is that if you evolve Cyndaquil to his third stage, Typhlosion, he will know the C-Day-only move Blast Burn, a 110 damage charge move, making him a lot stronger in battle. Probably not as strong as Moltres, Entei or Flareon, but not bad either.
But the real objective on Community Day, as ever, is to get yourself a new family of shinies. To catch a shiny Cyndaquil and evolve it into a shiny Typhlosion. So, how to go about maximizing those odds?
These days, it seems like Niantic keeps slowly increasing the shiny spawn rate. It used to hover around 3%, but I think these days it’s closer to 5% consistently, possibly even more, which means that if you catch 20 Cyndaquil, at least one of them should be shiny. Again, this is not a guarantee and you could catch 50-100 without getting one, but these days that situation feels more and more rare.
As ever, you are going to want to have incense running for the entire three hour duration of the event (which starts at 11 PT in the Americas), as incense does indeed spawn Community Day Pokémon consistently. Add in a three hour lure at places near you, and you’ll be drowning in Cyndaquil before you know it.
Wait until near the very end of the event to pick your shiny Cyndaquil to evolve, because you want to see if you can land a high IV one before you commit. But don’t wait too long, as you want to make sure that your shiny Typhlosion also has Blast Burn. Even if other people can now get this shiny family after this, none will have the unique Community Day move, making yours truly one of a kind.
There have been some issues during Community Day so far. In other regions, the game has been unplayable to the point where Niantic actually added an extra two hours to the day in order to make up for it, though I’m still hearing reports of problems. There’s no telling what the game will be like in America when this is going on, but hopefully we don’t run into similar issues, and Niantic figures out what’s going on.
After this, we’ll have a Totodile Community Day in probably two months, and then we’ll move on to the Gen 3 starters. But Cyndaquil, my own personal starter in Pokémon Silver, is one I am certainly not going to miss.
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