For the right price, you could get a full Pokédex in Pokémon Sword and Shield

Where there’s a will, there’s a way and video games are no exception to the rules of the market. For any completionist out there who yearns to be the best like no one ever was but find themselves short in the talent department, there are those people willing to give you a hand…for the right price of course. Destiny has a market of Guardians who’ll hand you a hand in a raid, Call of Duty has dedicated players who’ll help you reach max rank and even Pokémon has trainers who’ll help you reach your dream of pocket monster mastery.

While the trimmed down Galar pokedex is far from impossible to complete, it still works according to age-old Pokémon principles: Each partner game in the new generation of catch ‘em all mania happens to have a few exclusive Pokémon available within them, with the idea being that players will trade with each other to complete their pokedexs. Want an Appletun to help you finish up your quest? Offer a Flapple to the next person in the link trade and you’ll probably be sorted.

The problem here, is that Pokémon Sword and Shield has no link to the Global Trade Station of previous games, dating back to Pokémon X and Y. That hub was pretty much a dream for any OCD collector, as the method for getting ordinarily unobtainable Pokémon was pretty simple. Fire up the GTS, scroll through the pages of Pokémon you want and trade right then and there to get the little fella. Easy. You could even leave a rare Pokémon of your own overnight with parameters for what you were looking for in return, and chances were high that you’d come right.

Link Trade on the other hand, suffers from the fact that there’s very little communication done between players. Y-Comm facilities are available but they’re so obtuse that nine times out of ten a trading session is done on blind faith. Which quickly degenerates into annoyance when the same person offers you a Linoone for your Joltik for the fifth time in a row.

Unless you’ve got some good friends or blind luck, chances are that most players will never complete their Pokedex. Over on eBay though, there are those people who’ll help you out, with one auction currently sitting at $61 for a full Galar Pokedex that includes full-IV specced pocket monsters, Dynamax rarities and even a few shinies. Not bad.

If you’re looking for something rarer, there are even those people on eBay who’ll sell you a Shiny Pokémon for a few dollars, which isn’t a bad deal at all. After almost fifty hours of play, I’ve yet to see a single shiny, which should give you an indication of just how rare they really are. It may seem odd that people will drop so much cash just to set their minds at ease by collecting virtual pets, but hey this is Pokémon! The only question is, how much would you pay someone else to do all the heavy lifting in a game for you?

Last Updated: December 10, 2019