u/Jetsplit

That meaning, you only have access to your Eeveelution, the Poké Spot Pokémon, Zaprong, Duking's trades, and the Mt. Battle rewards.

I want to do this myself, so I'm trying to decide whether to evolve my Eevee into Umbreon or Vaporeon given the limited team options when excluding all the Shadows.

Genuinely not the slightest bit upset about reaching almost double odds here, it's just balancing things out after I previously got extremely lucky on the original GameCube version. On that version, I got one uncatchable tutorial Salamence at 1151 resets, two male Eevees at 3084 and 6897 resets, and finally my target female shiny Eevee at only 7646 resets.

Now, I'm thrilled and relieved to have my shiny starter for XD on NSO after only one Phase (the uncatchable tutorial Salamence at 7384 resets) and a total of 14225 resets! This hunt took about 3 months of resetting every day, with each reset taking about two minutes because of the unskippable opening cutscene. Nearly 300 hours were spent actively hunting, with my Switch profile saying I've been going 755 hours (never opened any game other than XD on the GameCube Classics NSO app) but that includes times I stepped away, or fell asleep and let the Switch automatically enter Sleep Mode, etc.

Now to figure out which evolution I want to go with (screenshot of all of them in the comments).

Getting ahead of some likely questions:

I thought Pokémon in XD were shiny locked?

Shadow Pokémon are, yes. The starter Eevee, the wild Pokéspot Pokémon, in-game trades, and the three Mt. Battle reward Pokémon can all be hunted with standard Gen 3 1/8192 shiny odds.

Was this RNG manipulated?

No. Full soft resets to the title screen using the B+X+Start button combination.

Did you use Suspend Points (save states)? You probably wouldn't have actually gone so far over odds, you probably just kept hitting the same frames.

No. It would've been nice if Suspend Points could speed the hunt up, but I specifically did proper in-game SRs because using Suspend Points will indeed lead to hitting the same RNG frames.

Why hunt on NSO? You can't trade or transfer to HOME, so this shiny's pointless and destined to disappear one day.

Honestly, I don't mind at all that shinies in this game are stuck here. Colosseum and XD are my two favourite Pokémon titles by far, and that's not even counting the fact that shinies in these games are much more special to me because they usually have different colours compared to the main series games. So I'll gladly keep Eevee and future shinies in this game until the day the GameCube Classics app is no longer usable.

I think it's highly possible that someone else somewhere has done this before, but after a good chunk of time spent searching terms like "Plusle Only" and "Solo Plusle", it seems like I may be the first to beat the entirety of Colosseum using only Duking's Plusle (from the point you obtain Plusle, of course). I've come across e.g. Solo Espeon runs, but no Solo Plusle runs.

Funny thing is, I didn't even specifically plan to be the first to do this. I only set out to do this because I got a shiny starter Eevee in XD, and in addition to making it a Ribbon Master I thought, since Eevee was there to help Snag and Purify every Shadow Pokémon in XD, it'd be a fun and unique idea to also have her be there to help Snag and Purify every Shadow Pokémon in Colosseum alongside Espeon and Umbreon. So that led to me boxing Espeon and Umbreon as soon as I got Plusle, KOing every Shadow Pokémon (since you get another chance at all of them in the post-game), and beating the entire game with only Plusle to unlock trading with the GBA titles. Now I'll be able to swap Plusle out for my shiny Eevee, and she can go liberate all of Colosseum's Shadow Pokémon with Espeon and Umbreon.

I don't claim to be skilled or cool because I did this; honestly, anyone experienced with Colosseum could do this with enough patience, grinding, and items. The most challenging part was just grinding Duel Square (I specifically beat the Shadow Noctowl trainer so many times) to get a high enough level to clear the stretch of the game between Skrub in Relic Forest and Dakim in Mt. Battle. The best non-Electric attacking move Plusle can get before The Under is Quick Attack, so that Ground-type gauntlet and especially all of the Geodudes, Gravelers, and Dakim's Golem were a nightmare.

In terms of Plusle itself, I didn't reset for an optimal one. I could've definitely made this easier if I did. Fortunately the first Plusle I got was pretty good!

• Decent Special Attack IVs (~19)
• Awful Attack IVs (Less than 5, unfortunate since Plusle's non-Electric attacking moves in Colosseum are all either Normal or Steel type)
• Hidden Power Fighting (a HUUUGE help for Ground-types, the Golem line, and Venus's Steelix)
• Sassy Nature (not competitively optimal but it didn't lower Special Attack and the Speed decrease wasn't too impactful since Plusle was so overleveled for most of the game)

Keeping Spark as my main attacking move for the entire game was also a questionable choice, but with how overleveled Plusle was it was still able to one-shot a lot of opponents and I didn't want to touch Mt. Battle to get the Thunderbolt TM before bringing my shiny Eevee into the game unless I had to.

Long but fun challenge. I'm happy I did it! If you have a Ribbon Master in Gen 3, consider doing something like this so you can liberate all the Shadow Pokémon with your RM as a special bonus accomplishment (you're also free to make the playthrough significantly easier with Espeon and Umbreon!).

My Switch profile says I've played the GameCube Classics app for 400+ hours...

I've never once opened it for anything other than XD 💀

Every. Single. Time.

Every time someone posts asking for advice on how to maximize the potential of a non-meta Pokémon, a significant majority of the answers just tell them to use the meta alternative or simply make sarcastic jokes. It happened again mere hours ago when someone asked how to make Palkia EX work: https://www.reddit.com/r/PTCGP/comments/1t41bnn/i\_need\_help\_how\_do\_i\_make\_this\_card\_work/

I'm curious: if you can see that some of the highest-voted comments on a post like this are "You travel back in time", "That's the neat part. You don't." and "gotta travel back to 2025 man", what value do you add to the conversation by then commenting "play in 2025"? Does no one here get tired of discouraging others from ever experimenting or trying to make their favourite Pokémon work? Wouldn't the battling in this game, which you all already complain is stale, be so much more enjoyable for you if you fought against a wider range of decks instead of the same few meta decks?

Here's the kicker: The person behind the linked post never suggested they were trying to reach Master Ball, or that they were even trying to play the deck in Ranked. In fact, they probably weren't thinking about Ranked considering we're between seasons. They just asked for advice on how to make a card they like work. That's it.

To be clear: I don't have any gripes or negative opinion of any of the commenters I quoted above. There's nothing inherently wrong with their comments, humour is a good thing, a lot of people liked their comments, and most importantly, these are Reddit posts about an app where you collect digital versions of cardboard. It's not a big deal at all and none of these people did anything wrong. Also, I did cherry-pick my examples; that Palkia EX post had some helpful comments too.

As I mentioned, this is a constant pattern with this subreddit. I haven't ever personally seen a post asking for advice about a non-meta card having more genuine advice and discussion than jokes and comments saying to use the meta alternative. Are a couple comments suggesting the person use the better alternative a good thing? Yes, it's possible OP doesn't know, or doesn't see why the meta alternative is so much better. Is it beneficial having more than 50% of the comments suggest the meta alternative? Not in my opinion, but maybe others disagree.

I made one of these deck help posts myself a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/PTCGP/comments/1kcv3i4/finally\_got\_the\_pack\_points\_required\_for\_my/

I acknowledged in the description it was a lackluster card, but that I still wanted deck suggestions. Even then, I still got comments saying things like "I tried many, and this card is bad..." and "Put in any water deck as it is a bad card, so it doesn't make any difference". And yet, I've consistently gotten Master Ball rank with decks that ONLY have Eevee and Glaceon for Pokémon. Don't get me wrong, it takes way more matches than it would using a meta deck, but I actually have fun when using my favourite Pokémon, so that's not an issue.

Here's the point of this post.

What value do you get out of offering genuine feedback when someone asks how to maximize a Pokémon's potential? A richer, more diverse battle landscape.

What value do you get when you discourage them from using the Pokémon in question? Some upvotes and another match against Igglybuff and Darkrai.

If the upvotes are more valuable to you, by all means. But maybe ask yourself if that's the case before commenting next time.