Have you ever felt like Shiny Pokemon were a bit underwhelming? If you say no, you’re lying. It feels like half of the Shinies are either just a slightly different shade of the same color as the original or just straight up look worse – or sometimes both. Look at Shiny Glaceon or Shiny Blastoise and try to tell me Pokemon doesn’t have a huge problem with the design of Shinies.
Outside of a few rockstars like Black Charizard and Red Gyarados, the only thing that has ever made Shinies feel special is their rarity. Unfortunately, even that has gone out the window in recent years. Finding Shinies in Pokemon Go is trivial, and Sword & Shield increased the rate of Shiny encounters dramatically. If they’re not that rare, and they don’t look good, then what’s the point?
Enter: Sparkling Pokemon. Teased for the next Japanese TCG expansion, Battle Legion, Sparkling Pokemon are everything that Shiny Pokemon should have been. If Sparkling ‘mons make their way from the card game into other kinds of Pokemon games, we could quickly find ourselves in a new golden era of rare Pokemon hunting.
Sparkling Pokemon are like Shiny Shinies. They have the same basic color pattern as the Shiny version, but they’re also layered with a sparkle effect thanks to the foil pattern of the cards. The two examples we’ve seen so far, Sparkling Greninja and Sparkling Hawlucha, both have a rainbow crosshatch pattern that gives them new colors and some interesting texture. Simply put, they’re sparkly Shiny Pokemon.
But Sparkling Pokemon aren’t just Shinies with a new look. These Pokemon are so powerful that you can only have one in each deck. This could put an interesting twist on the Shiny hunt, since regular Shinies have the same stats as their non-Shiny counterparts.
It’s worth mentioning that the Pokemon TCG has had plenty of mechanics over the years that never translated to other Pokemon games. Prime Pokemon were introduced during the HeartGold & SoulSilver generation as a super-powered version of regular Pokemon, and LV.X Pokemon from Diamond & Pearl were special evolutions that provided Pokemon with additional moves and abilities. Most recently, 2020’s Vivid Voltage expansion introduced Amazing Pokemon, a special variant of regular Pokemon that often used energy that did not match their type. None of these mechanics ever made their way into the core Pokemon RPG series.
There is one exception, however. Delta Species are Pokemon that have had their type changed by exposure to electromagnetic waves. Delta Species Mewtwo is Electric-type and Delta Species Pikachu is Steel-type (or Metal, in Pokemon TCG terms), for example. These Pokemon were introduced in 2005’s EX Delta Species expansion 11 years before Pokemon Sun & Moon introduced regional variants. Delta Species aren’t exactly the same as region variants, of course, but the idea for variant types certainly started in the TCG.
Hopefully we don’t have to wait 11 years for Sparkling – or some new version of Shinies – to make their way into the main games. A super-powered shiny with new moves or a special ability would make them a lot more fun to hunt, even if it would prevent them from being used in normal tournament play. I’d love to see Shiny Pokemon become even more common so that casual players can have an easier time finding them while Sparkling Pokemon become the new, ultra-rare Pokemon to hunt. Maybe it’s just the TCG collector in me that’s so used to multiple rarity levels, but I wouldn’t mind a rarer Shiny variant at all. If we can have rare, ultra-rare, hyper-rare, rainbow, full-art, and gold Pokemon cards, we can have two levels of Shiny Pokemon.
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