Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home
I'm going to try and explain to you why, in the Pokemon trading system, this Pokemon is currently worth One Money:
To do that, I have to describe Pokemon Home.
Home is busted and it sucks so much
Over the years, the Pokemon games have changed how trading works pretty extensively. Since the Switch Pokemon games launched, searchable trade listings can only be posted on a mobile app: the mobile version of Pokemon Home. And Home is a fucking mess.
Home is the only service which currently allows players to transfer Pokemon between Switch games. However, the mobile and Switch versions of Pokemon Home have completely different features. Whenever I want to organize my Pokemon in Home, I need to sit down with both apps and laboriously switch back and forth between them, carefully saving my changes as I go to avoid interruptions or data loss.
Switch Home performs all the tasks related to your Switch games. It connects directly to your game saves on the Switch and moves Pokemon between your storage boxes, editing and your save files without launching those games.
Mobile Home, on the other hand, is primarily for trading Pokemon between different users. It has trade listing and search features, and an account system which is completely invisible in the Switch version of the app.
This is not the only data which is invisible on Switch: the mobile app also has a Pokemon tagging and starring system which the Switch version doesn't have. Starring is particularly important - it prevents you from trading or deleting any starred Pokemon, and is a good way of tracking which Pokemon in the system you intend to keep permanently. Whether a Pokemon has a star on it or not is usually the most crucial piece of information I need. But I can't see the stars I assign at all when I use the Switch version of the app... and I can't move Pokemon between boxes in the Mobile version of the app!
It turns every trade into a disaster. You cannot use both apps at the same time, so you cannot review your stars in Mobile while moving Pokemon around in the boxes on Switch. Sometimes I have to screenshot the app on mobile to remind myself which Pokemon I recently starred and need to move into boxes. It's a fucking nightmare. Here's a screenshot I took for that purpose only a few days ago.
Playing something because you hate it
I'm trying to describe this weird situation to you because these and other bizarre UI and feature decisions in the Home ecosystem have controlled how trading works for recent generations of Pokemon games in this really weird, gamer-ass way. It reminds me a LOT of online auctionhouses in MMOs. The Home system is so limited and fucked by UI that its users have been forced to create a bunch of weird trading conventions to get around the things it won't let you do.
On the other hand... I love MMO auctionhouses and trading systems. I have loved many busted ones. A jank system can be fun if it has problems that you can learn to exploit or work around.
That is part of what's going on with Home. The UI doesn't let you do what you want to do. Instead, you have to do something much more frustrating... which has its own joys, too.
Trading for Shinies
My "living dex" is complete - I have one of each Pokemon saved on my Home account, in order, in a gigantic series of boxes.
I'm now working on a "shiny living dex" - a duplicate of that collection, but made with only shiny Pokemon. Shinies are alternate-color-scheme Pokemon which start with a spawn rate of about 1 in 4000. A lot of people collect them. Check out this video for a great overview of "shiny hunting," the probabilities involved, and the reasons why players bother collecting shinies in the first place.
I don't want to do "full odds" shiny hunting, though. I want to trade for them. I never even wanted a shiny living dex until Home launched and I realized I could learn to exploit its trade system.
The network created by Home and Pokemon Go also make the chase a lot quicker and more interesting for me. Go usually releases shiny Pokemon as part of time-limited events. Each one subsequently becomes much more common on Home. If you watch the calendar, you can get them more easily than you otherwise would.
I played Pokemon Go avidly between 2016 and 2022, and I have a huge library of shiny Pokemon in Go which I am slowly transferring to Home and using in trades myself. Scarlet also makes it much easier to hunt for shinies, so I have a bunch there too. Each shiny Pokemon is valuable to SOMEBODY. So all I need to do is trade them for other shinies I don't yet have.
The problem is that the Home UI makes this impossible.
Getting around UI limitations
Imagine you went through the laborious process of moving your Pokemon from Go or Scarlet or Violet and want to trade them. You jumped through all those hoops, going back and forth between two incompatible versions of the same app. You load up the trade UI and discover that you cannot list a trade asking for a specific shiny Pokemon, and you cannot filter trade listings by shiny Pokemon.
So you simply can't trade two shinies at all. Instead, you have to use a currency Pokemon as a form of exchange between them.
Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.
This has been the custom since pretty early in Home's operation. Generally, people will list their shinies for the currently-rarest tradeable Pokemon in the entire collection of all Pokemon released ever. This usually means:
- A "Legendary"-level Pokemon that you can only get one of during a playthrough.
- It has to come from the most recently-released mainline game or DLC in the series, because everything that has been out longer is less desirable.
- It has to be a Pokemon that has NOT released in Pokemon Go. Any Pokemon in Go immediately becomes much more common.
- There has to be some amount of natural collector demand for this Pokemon. A lot of the time, this natural demand is created by the Pokemon being version-locked to only one version of the game. The desire can also come from competitive play.
This means that the Pokemon which functions as "currency" changes every time a Pokemon game is officially connected to the Switch and Mobile Home apps. The most recent time that happened was for the Indigo Disk DLC to Scarlet and Violet, which was in December 2023.
So, for the last six or so years, the various overlapping reigns of "currency" Pokemon have included:
- The rarer "Ultra Beast" Pokemon from the Sun and Moon/Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon 3DS games. At the launch of Home, a much wider variety of Pokemon functioned as "currency" than currently do, possibly because players were trying to get ones they'd missed in Sun and Moon.
- Zacian and Zamazenta, from Sword and Shield. These remained occasionally-in-demand all the way up until Go dropped them as raid bosses, which cratered their demand instantly.
- Kubfu, and Urshifu Rapid Strike Style or Single Strike Style, from the Isle of Armor DLC for Sword and Shield
- Regidrago, Glastrier, Spectrier, or Calyrex - from the Crown Tundra DLC for Sword and Shield. Spectrier and Glastrier probably stood as reliable currency Pokemon for the longest unbroken period of time that I used the app.
- Enamorus, an endgame legendary from Pokemon Legends: Arceus
- Koraidon and Miraidon, from Scarlet and Violet, though desire for these two fell off very quickly, since the player gets 2 of them in the base playthrough and everyone was only trading off their extra.
- Bloodmoon Ursaluna, from The Teal Mask DLC for Scarlet and Violet. Unfortunately this one is so rarely available that I see a lot of open trades for Bloodmoon Ursaluna piling up with no takers, so I don't recommend asking for it when listing a trade.
- Raging Bolt, from The Indigo Disk DLC for Scarlet and Violet.
Raging Bolt is now very close to the singular currency of choice for trading in Home, much more obviously and firmly than any one of the currencies I've listed above. There's a couple reasons for this.
- Raging Bolt is viable in competitive play, so there's a strong natural demand for it. This is also why people want Bloodmoon Ursaluna.
- Raging Bolt is version-locked to Scarlet, so not all players can get it.
- You can only get it at the end of The Indigo Disk, the second chapter of DLC for the base game, so you have to play very far through several plot arcs to get it unlocked.
- I suspect that the version Raging Bolt is locked to, Scarlet, may have sold fewer copies than Violet, which would make it under-supplied. I have no hard proof of this, but when Home opened up to Pokemon from Scarlet and Violet, it was much harder to find Scarlet endgame "paradox Pokemon" listed for trade than the equivalent Violet Pokemon.
Raging Bolt's companion version-locked Pokemon, Gouging Fire, is not used as a currency anywhere nearly as often. And their opposite-version Pokemon, Iron Crown and Iron Boulder, don't even rate. With pretty much only one Pokemon I need to keep on hand "as money," it's a lot easier to find the shinies I want. I don't have to search 3-5 different legendaries in the trade listings to find a shiny I'm capable of "buying" anymore. Yesterday, I traded 6 different Raging Bolts for 6 different shinies I wanted, and each took me about a minute. It's so convenient now!
This is the first time I've seen this kind of consensus happen in Home. The trade customs are evolving!
The thrill of the chase
When I played Guild Wars 2, I cornered the market on "black peppercorns" for the entire Blackgate server for about half a year. Years later, in 2020, I played FFXIV as an auction house freak. I love markets in games, and I love figuring them out. Almost all of them have UI flaws or fee structures which encourage players to do unwise, exploitable things. In GW2, I seem to recall, it was possible to list very small and cheap things, like black peppercorns, for such low prices that your earnings would be nearly wiped out by fees.
Home is the in-game market I've messed with which is most deeply marked by poor UI decisions. It's so busted and horrible that every single decision I make is a battle with the UI. I can be as pissed as I want, but on one level, MMO markets are fun because they have these bizarre quirks to learn. When GW2 players listed their trades badly, I was having some amount of fun taking advantage of their ignorance.
But the best fun in these games is actually not that. It is a pain, actually, to go around the market hoovering up all the tiny black peppercorn trade listings during your lunch hour every day (with my boss's blessing. He found this funny). The fun actually comes from learning something about other people's behavior that allows you to anticipate desires and meet them.
In FFXIV I once spent a weekend crafting furniture parts so that I could list them all for massively inflated values on the same day that a bunch of brand new player housing went on sale. Everyone had a new house, so everyone needed new furniture, and they were willing to pay way more than usual to make their place look good. Pulling off trades like this is incredibly satisfying! Making money isn't really the point - feeling like you understand what people want and are communicating with them, or predicting their needs somehow, is the real thrill. It makes you feel smart. In a lot of these games, I wasn't even really saving up for anything in particular. I just enjoyed the gameplay of figuring out what people needed.
Pokemon Home's fucked UI forces people to engage in this kind of wordless debate about what the Most Fungible Pokemon is at any give time. Right now, there's so much consensus that it feels kind of ridiculous. Most people only want Raging Bolt. The coin of the realm is this big giraffe guy. That, specifically, is the fun bit, to me. Learning that I can keep this one guy on hand and get any shiny I want is fun. Learning which shinies will get common and easier to find thanks to event schedules in different games is fun. It makes me feel smart.
I do wonder if it would be more fun and weird if I could trade shinies for shinies directly, though. I don't expect the Home app ecosystem to last forever - it doesn't feel built to last! - so I'm wondering if they'll swap it out for something better in the next generation. I'm particularly curious if they will ever add trading to the Switch version of the app. Since the dev teams for these apps are possibly completely different, that change would likely come with a huge UI update that could make very different market gameplay possible.
Other topics
There's a lot more to say here about how hacked Pokemon work in the system, how they affect player desire, and what the Home network does to the other connected Pokemon games on, like, an enjoyment level. I might write more about that later!