December Community Day 2021 Recap

_{Thumbnail image is from https://pokemongolive.com/ with Garchomp and Mega Gyarados added to it by me}

This past weekend the December Community Day took place as mentioned in my previous blog post. All of the Pokémon were spawning on both days. About half of them were also attracted more to Incense and Lures on Saturday and the others on Sunday.

I mentioned that there were going to be Field Research Tasks with Mega Energy for Pokémon featured in the Community Days these past two years that also have their Mega Evolved version in the game already.

Unfortunately it seems that on Saturday and Sunday itself starting from 11 am through 5 pm the Field Research Tasks changed. So more of them had Poké Balls, Great Balls, Ultra Balls, Pinap Berries or Stardust rewards and only a few had Mega Energy. Which kinda sucks, because obviously I spin most PokéStops I walk past during the event, and I can't be bothered to throw them all away all the time before I catch 3 Pokémon.

At least they did have these on Friday and Monday as well. So I collected a pretty good amount of Mega Energy on Friday when I walked around with a friend and also got some on Monday before they changed.

This allowed me to get enough Mega Energy to Mega Evolve Gyarados for the first time! Because I don't really like doing Mega Raids, maybe if Niantic at some points decides to increase the free daily Raid Pass to 2 I would consider spending those on Mega Raids sometimes.

I was really excited that I finally had enough Mega Gyarados Energy so I decided to Mega Evolve it on Saturday and get more Gible Candy that way. Buuut that wasn't the case... in my excitement I kinda thought Mega Gyarados became Water- and Dragon-type while in reality it's Water- and Dark-type 😅😅😅 So I should've really Mega Evolved Charizard to Mega Charizard X for the additional Gible Candy. Oh well at least I can share my Mega Gyarados Pokédex registry. And I got to earn some more Energy for it by walking around with it as my Buddy Pokémon.

Throughout the days I walked around with 3 friends for most of the time. Until one of them had to go home then I walked around with just the others two. Sometimes we'd run into others that we know, but not all too often. The weather was kinda cold so several people likely tried to play from home with Incense. Except for a little bit of tiny rain drops on Saturday it at least stayed dry the whole weekend which was a great bonus. A rainy day with the already cold weather would've been really cold.

We covered a good distance walking around on both days and a lot of catches!

I bought the Special Research ticket for the December Community Day 2021 Special Research line. What I liked about it this year was that they didn't specify some of the Pokémon. Last year the first parts of it focused on the Pokémon spawning more on Saturday and the next parts focused on those for Sunday. But I then forgot to continue and couldn't finish the final part that Sunday. Which led to me taking a long time to find the last Electabuzz and Magmar to finish it.

So this year they did a much greater job by having the Catch task parts of it be for "Catch 15 Pokémon featured during 2021's Community Days".

These next 4 pictures will be the story from the Special Research.

From the last parts of the Special Research we gained an Elite Fast TM and an Elite Charged TM. So this Special Research Ticket was definitely worth it!

In the Today view there were several pages of tasks that led to encounters with one of each Pokémon featured in the 2020 and 2021 Community Days. From those encounters I got 2 Shinies. A Shiny Abra and a Shiny Porygon. The Porygon was a 3-star with Abra only being a 2-star.

As you can see in the other part of the photo, I caught 60 Shiny Pokémon on both days over the weekend. I only took a snapshot of two part of this list, including all 60 didn't feel so worth as I already had several Shinies of all featured Pokémon. This Porygon was unfortunately the only 3-star Shiny that I got over the whole weekend. It would've been great to possibly get some more 3-star Shiny Pokédex parts filled out but oh well.

During the Community Day I realised that apparently I never evolved a Lucky Gible and Lucky Piplup during their respective Community Days. I guess it makes sense because the Lucky Piplup wasn't that great that I would use it and I also never really had any really good Lucky Gible and I've had quite an amount of them already. Usually if they do end up high 90% IV they have like 12-13 Attack and I really only want 15 Attack ones to really use xD Especially since I already have a 100% IV regular Gible since Gible Community Day.

So I ended up evolving a Lucky Gible that I received from a trade on Saturday and evolved this Lucky Piplup I still had. To add Lucky Gabite and Garchomp in my Pokédex as well as Lucky Prinplup and Empoleon.

I am still missing Lucky Sylveon too, that's because during Eevee Community Day I forgot to earn 7 hearts with a Lucky Eevee to evolve. This time the discount on hearts earned wasn't present anymore so I couldn't do it either as I haven't prepared a Lucky Eevee to 70 Buddy Hearts yet. I'll get to that sometime.

Overall it was good time walking around with friends and I managed to get some good catches as well. Including for example a 100% IV Gible, a Shinx and a Piplup. I didn't get enough Gible XL Candy to potentially evolve two to level 50, so I'm still at enough for only one of them. Eventually I'll get it though, I'm not in a rush yet to power two of them up.

How did your Community Day weekend go?