This weekend is the long-awaited Eevee Community Day in Pokémon GO, one that spans six hours over two days on August 11 and 12 from 2-5 PM ET each day.
Eevee has been an anticipated feature for Community Day for ages now because it has five potential shiny evolutions right now, seven with Gen 4 arriving soon, which is a true rarity in Pokémon GO. Yes, special Eevee has Last Resort as a unique normal move, but it’s the shinies that everyone is going to be going after.
Unfortunately, the odds of getting all shiny Eevee evolutions are not…especially in your favor, and you will have to catch a large number of shinies to make that happen through sheer probability alone.
While you can manually evolve Espeon and Umbreon by walking 10 km with Eevee as your buddy, then evolving it during the day or at night, Flareon, Vaporeon and Jolteon are still completely random evolutions, provided you’ve used up your one “naming trick” that allows you to pick one of each, one time only.
To show how steep these odds are, here’s a chart via Silph Road’s u/Popple06 showing how the math works:
What this means in practice is that even if you manage to secure three shiny Eevees, which may be no easy task itself, the odds you’ll get three distinct evolutions from them is barely over 20%. You’ll actually have to catch and evolve nine shiny Eevees to push those odds over 90%, and even then you can still have very bad luck. A 99% likelihood only starts around 14-15 shiny Eevee evolutions.
And of course, you can add two more shiny Eevees to any of these numbers, given that you’ll presumably also want an extra two to manually evolve into shiny Umbreon and Espeon. And then add in at least another two if you want to save two shiny Eevees for potential Gen 4 evolutions of shiny Leafeon and Glaceon, which could be arriving very soon indeed.
In short, you are going to have to grind a whole lot of shinies this weekend unless Niantic does something drastic.
They’re already doubling the event to two days, so that’s something. They could flat-out increase the spawn rate of shinies which would help dramatically.
Or, they could finally introduce evolution stones.
It seems very weird at this point in Pokémon GO’s lifespan that while we have all other manner of evolution items, Dragon Scales and Metal Coats and such, we still do not have the fundamental set of evolution items in the game, elemental stones. I understand that might not have been a priority at first when Pokémon GO launched, but two years later? Yeah, it would be good to have them in the game, particularly in situations like this. And with Leafeon and Glaceon about to arrive, which also use stones, it would be nice to be able to choose our Eevee evolutions going forward instead of having only a 20% chance of getting the one we want in any given evolution.
Will Niantic introduce these this week? That does seem rather unlikely, but you may want to save a collection of shiny Eevees to put on ice in case Niantic does introduce this down the road. You could evolve five and get five Jolteons, or you could just wait for stones to arrive, and have one of every evolution. But with no word on when or if these stones are coming, I can understand why you might be impatient.
Regardless, the grind is going to be real this weekend. Best of luck to you.
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