Of course, this is all based on my personal experience so the results are in fact limited and biased. I have noticed that with the people I trade the most with I usually come around a Lucky on the fourth/fifth trade. Sometimes that may extend further to perhaps six but usually in that area. So for example this happened yesterday, Lucky Pilloswine, then traded Nidoran, Gastly, Slakoth, Lugia, Machamp and Lucky Alakazam. Sometimes it is faster and sometimes slower. However, as a disclaimer I have a friend I traded over 10 pokemon with from 2016 with 0 Lucky Pokemon until they announced the guaranteed lucky and still nothing after he reached the limit. So perhaps 20 trades between us outside of the guaranteed Lucky and not a single random lucky. Good luck, hope it helps, happy hunting on Community Day.
Lucky odds
So, I'm trying to figure out the best way to play a CD with lucky trading in the mix. What are the odds of a trade getting lucky if one trades a recently caught pokemon for another (perhaps the same one caught by another trainer)?
Hope to test idea out on Chicorita, and with results, apply to the expected Beldum CD next month. The basic idea is that if you trade two pokemon and they get lucky, your IVs would average around 91%, so any pokemon with IVs less than that can be traded with the small chance of a large possible gain (as well as half the dust cost to power up.) I think the way to go is to hunt with someone else, and every 10 minutes or so, trade everything you have caught that clearly isn't top IV stuff. 96 of 100 pokemon wild caught in neutral weather won't have IVs over 80%, and just under 10% of weather buffed pokemon will be over 80%, so just trade them on the spot, and dump any non-lucky ones unless the IVs are stellar.
That way, one can generate, hopefully, 2-3 lucky top IV candidates to evolve before the end of the CD and get the special move. I have no good Beldum now, or Bagon, and unless I get very fortunate in catching, don't expect to get great IVs from 3 hours of hunting, even in a very target rich environment.
We had sunny weather for Larvitar CD, I hunted all three hours, caught everything I could, and only ended up with one 91% SD/SE, and three more with lower IVs (including the shiny at 70%). They have performed well against the legendary birds (including allowing me to win damage in a 4 person raid against 2 competent Valor trainers), but aren't the top shelf IVs I'd like to have. (And of course, if Rhyperior gets a double rock move, they could be second best by a fair amount in a few months.)
So I think trading on CD is the way to get a few luckies on the spot, and power them up with the special move. Double benefit of good stats, easier to power up, and by dumping bad trade ones, not using up as much bag space on CD.
So, could some of you with hundreds of trades under your belts weigh in on the approximate odds of getting lucky with recent pokemon in trades? That's the last piece of the math I need to optimize the strategy. Will report here before CD, and after to comment on how it went.
My data, 28 trades, 7 lucky, some trades before lucky numbers were buffed, and none that were guaranteed. Among my luckies, 2 SC Gengars, Machamp, Yanma, Snorlax, Tangela, Rhyhorn. Among my more notable fails, a Rhydon from Aug 2016 before the automatic buff, got an SC Gengar for an Elekid, not lucky, Dragonite level 6 horrid IVs from December 2016 traded away to a friend with no Dragonite, didn't get lucky. So my numbers fall right at 1 in 4, which seems really high. Hope to swap some Swinubs after this event ends.
Answers
Personally I would say this is a pretty good thought, but still needs luck. I'm not sure what the exact odds is. Someone says it might be 1/20, but based on my own experience (I trade 5-10 mons with my wife everyday), same-day-caught pokemon gets lucky maybe 1/50.
Having lucky high iv CD pokemon sounds very attractive, but there are a few things I'm worrying about.
First of all, trading every mon caught on CD day mean losing dust. Although it might be paid back in terms of getting high iv lucky and some extra candy, it's still some kind of lost.
Secondly, you might end up with getting high iv but low level mons, or adequate iv (<90, attack not 15) and low level mons, which is even worse. That could be pain in the ass, as low level means more candy to power up, while for mons like Beldum or Bagon, candy could be more scarce than dust.
Finally but most importantly, trading requires time. When you are trading during CD hours, you are losing time to catch more (which means more candy) and losing chance to catch high iv ones (the chance is low, but nobody knows beforehand). If the odds of getting lucky is not high enough, it might not worth doing it.
Anyway, I would think this is a good angle to take advantage of both trading (lucky guarantees iv floor) and CD (powerful move). If you are gonna try this out on Saturday, please let me know your estimate result. I would like weigh it and consider whether carry it out for Beldum CD.
After the update that raised the IV floor to 12 my lucky rate has been about 1/40. Significant drop in the rate is pretty much certain but it might not be as drastic as my experience.
Regarding the community day tactic of trading during the 3h window, I can't recommend it. Meganium with FP isn't meta relevant in the first place, so getting a lucky with the move shouldn't be a priority. If you want it regardless, just realize that you're going to catch/shinycheck less Chikoritas if you spend your time on trade screens. If you get unlucky, it might require an hour of your time during the CD to get the one lucky.
The point is to use Meganium as a test case to see if it works smoothly enough to use on a more important pokemon like Beldum.
The question is whether I can catch a better pokemon with 2.5 hours of hunting and 0.5 of trading or three hours of trading. Not clear what the answer is, need to check the numbers, hence the request for odds.
Fair enough. I guess it could be worth it for an additional chance of scoring good IVs on a MM Metagross.
Personally with Beldum I don't think I could justify spending more than a few minutes on not pinap-catching. Having a plus or gotcha does help, but the catch yield for the time that you spend trading will still be notably worse.
Yes, that's the tradeoff. Catching for 3 hours will net me a lot of bad Beldums, maybe one that's worth powering up, or marginally so, and a lot of candy. Trading for a little while could net me a few Beldums worth powering up, especially at the lower dust cost.
My idea is to hunt for 45 min to an hour, then sit down and trade the bottom 96% as quickly as possible, seeing if I get a good lucky, or not. If not, hunt again. If so, hunt again, but with the idea that I'll trade again, and focus more on candy than pokemon.
My bag of 1500 is nearly full, so I'll have to make space before Beldum CD. Not overly concerned with this weekend, just doing a test run.
The people I play with aren't generally short on stardust and most have a few good Beldums saved, but I do see some merits to your plan and I'll definitely bring it up as an option. With the recent lucky rate, it just seems so disheartening that one might waste a lot of time to not get a single lucky. A few hours ago I did 53 trades and got 0.
It's a good strategy for CD moving forward.
Before running into it:
- You only have 7 luckies, right? So, you have a guaranteed lucky if you trade something from July/August 2016. Why don't you hold on this until beldum day? That way you would get one or more high IV (up to 3). If you reached the 10th lucky this weekend, you would lose that great advantage.
- Note: if you evolve a lucky chikorita all the way up to meganium every evolution counts as a lucky. So don't trade chikoritas, trade meganium or you will lose your possibility of guaranteed lucky!!
That's the most important for your particular situation.
For the strategy in general, sounds good. Some considerations:
- Lower IV with lucky is 12/12/12 (80%). You may still not get over your 91% threshold even after many luckies. But there's very good chances, yes.
- Guarantee your shinies, then trade. Trading takes a lot of time. Optimise your strategy playing for an hour in a row or so until you get your shinies. Then consider trading only the highest level mons. You may include shinies at this point which is nice.
- Lucky odds are low. Lower than they used to. I had done more than 300 before the guaranteed lucky. My data suggested something around 10% (small dataset, thought). Now people are reporting much lower odds.
Tl;Dr Guarantee your shiny; evolve first, then trade.
Yes, was thinking along those lines.
All my July/August 2016 pokemon have been traded away, before the automatic change.
Chances of getting 91% IVs or better on a lucky pokemon is 50%. So if I can manage to get 4 lucky ones, I'd expect 2 to be over 91% (and cheap to power up). And even if the best one is 89 or 87, that's not terrible.
I'm not as hung up on 15 attack as most people here - attack is the most important stat, but a 15/10/10 (ads) won't outperform a 14/14/14. Just trying to get some solid stats. Also not too concerned about shinies. They can be nice, but they fight just the same as non-shines.
I see. Do you have any left from September 2016?
Let's say that Niantic means 2+ y.o. pokemon and they mention Jul/Aug because we are in September. In October, when hypothetically Beldum day takes place, Sep 2016 pokemon will also be 2+ y.o. and you have your guaranteed trade.
Also, does your trading partner have less than 10 lucky and some pokemon from Jul/Aug/Sep 2016? In that case both of you could grant a lucky Metagross.
I am telling this because my concern is that you may miss your chance of guarantee a lucky beldum if you reach the 10 lucky cap beforehand. Other than that the experiment you suggest is really interesting.
Given that what counts is the result (lucky beldum), trading any 2016 pokemon for any high level beldum is going to result a more solid strategy than trading dozens of beldum caught in the day.
If both, you and your partner, have any old pokemon from 2016 (or even early 2017, although this is pure speculation on my side) you can trade them back to back a high level beldum caught any time.
I have traded 2016 pokemon to try to force lucky machamp or lucky legendaries. It's not guaranteed in my case, so it didn't work every time, but it worked with high odds.
Last comment: by beldum CD you may already know the real figures. The SiIphRoad have been researching this topic for a long time. I think that they will have results soon to tell us what are the odds of lucky between pokemon recently caught and some other situations.
The idea of using an old pokemon to guarantee lucky, or bump the odds a lot, is sound. Don't have that many old ones, though. Further, if I did, have to ask if Meteor Mash Beldum is the best use of them. I mean, if it were Rayquaza community day it would be a no-brainer. (Yes, I know that will never be a thing :-( , pity that.) I expect that Niantic will continue to tweak the probabilities and the limits for the guarantee. 6 months from now it might be 1.5+ year old pokemon, and having under 25 luckies to get an automatic. We'll see.
Bottom line, though is that for non-legendaries, it's silly to power up a non-lucky anymore. They cost less dust and have better IVs than regular pokemon, so the best ways to play are to get luckies as cheaply as possible and power them up as much as possible.
Good thinking but it relies too much on luck, which can kick you hard in the butt.
After reading this 2 times, 2 alternative ideas came to mind.
1) In order to prioritize time effectiveness, I would run a second phone used exclusively for trading so that catching and trading can be done simultaneously without slowing your main phone down and minimizing the time waste. This will NOT get you any kind of soft-ban or strike, I have tested this for over a year on the same 3 accounts and it hasn't even been shadowbanned. Many, many other players in my area can back this up through experimenting of their own. All'll be cool as long as you run the same account at the same location.
2) If you have enough candies, just evolve all high-level mons you catch and trade them afterwards. I did this for eevee as I had over 4k candies before that CD started. This will be a lot less time-consuming and optimize your catching times.
My wife started playing way after Ttar C-day, so in retrospective, I should have done exactly that during it so that I could have traded her some of the trash ones in hopes for a good reroll. I managed to evolve 12 decent IV lvl 35 SD Tyranitar but I could have evolved 20 more at least lvl 25 and above had I known trading would become a thing so soon. I had enough larvitar and candies, I just didn't think there would be a benefit in evolving low IV specimens. I still have 3.5k+ larvitar candies I will probably never use... So yeah... I think it is a viable idea but you need to be a power player to risk that amount of candy for a gamble. It would still pay off greatly time wise, increasing your number of catches and your chances of finding a shiny.
The catch is trying to get a strong IV lucky one WITH the signature move. That has to happen during the CD window. Of course, trading any ones I have before the event will speed up the process, and if they get lucky, great, we're all set. But I have 3 pretty poor Beldums, one is level 31, other two in the low 20s, and for Bagon, I now have 7 bad ones and 250 candy (no Salamance, none worth evolving).
If the special move is lackluster, then this strategy is pointless. Just catch as many as you can, then trade them later and hope for the best.
Keep those Beldum, especially the level 31. Later Niantic might expand the guaranteed lucky window (this is only my hope). For now although both my wife and I have 10+ luckies, trading new caught with 2016 July/August still gives a high chance to get lucky (my guess is 0.5 - 0.75). If this trend continues and later the window is expanded, you might find someone else who can trade with you to nail lucky before CD. Also keep old mons.
I myself have barely 160-170 Bagon candy and Beldum candy, and no good candidate to evolve. I'm worried about Beldum CD as it's near impossible to grab a high value one before that, especially right now the Kanto event kills the probability to catch wild Beldum. That's another reason that I treasure your posted thought.
Here's a reply which may depress you. I replied to this same question two weeks ago (ish) saying I had 31 luckies out of 454 trades. Since then I had a long unlucky spell and hit lucky 32 on my 515th trade. So 1 out of 61 which is in line with those saying 1 in 40 or 50. Virtually all were new catches. I have tried lots of combinations which matched Mons for: "stage" (ie single stage like Pinsir for Chansey) and "stardust level (ie 3500, 4000 etc) and appraisal (ie strong for strong) but nothing seems to boost lucky chances (except date in storage of course). Thus perhaps it really is random as to when one gets Lucky. I got a lot of IV boosts when trading so it is still a viable practice to get high IV Mons from the rubbish.
Has any noticed a tendency for Community Day caught Mons to get lucky more often? After Eevee CD I traded a lot of Eevees and got an unusually high amount of Luckies and it seems an unusual number which increased IVs to 82%+ / Battle with Best / Wonder etc. I still have a lot of Larvitars left from Larv CD and will trade those at some point. Dratinis as well.
Prior to the Lucky (de)Buff: I was getting about 20% Lucky Pokémon, but most of them were lower IV (below 80%). Out of about 150 Pokémon that I traded, I had about 30 Lucky Pokémon - they seemed to come in batches, where I would get 4 Lucky in a row (my first two Lucky's were 93% Tyranitar and an 89% Larvitar, and they came back-to-back).
Since the (de)Buff, I have traded about 70 Pokémon and have not yet gotten a single Lucky. Unfortunately I started playing in Sept 2016, so none of my Pokémon were eligible for the Auto-Lucky for age, and most of the people I play with went through and trashed all their old Mons that weren't worth keeping.
So, Pre-(de)Buff: 30/150 (approx.)
Post-(de)Buff: 0/70
All of you may be happy to know that you can evolve up to an hour after the CD is over. I tested this myself with beldum yesterday. So just catch everything till they despawn. Then go through and trade.
On the flip side i spent that hour trading beldums with my GF and we traded almost 100 and no luckies...though we did get some in the high 90's which was still useful, as were the extra candies (enough fo another full evolve).
