Pokémon ftw!

I'm actually late to the Pokémon hype. I was always into the anime but never got a Pokémon game because I was a perfectionist who likes to 100% her games. Pokémon is one of those games where, at the time, it was quite hard to do that legitimately. So I wasn't interested in it until my adulthood.

I started playing Pokémon back in 2017. My first game was Pokémon Emerald. A solid start to the franchise. My goal wasn't to collect them all at the time. It was just to train and raise my own team and matchy-matchy all of the Pokémon in appropriate Pokéballs.

My shiny luck has always been really good. I got a shiny Beautifly in Emerald in 2017 with minimal effort. Then when I played Platinum in 2018, I got a shiny Piplup first try as my starter. I wasn't even going for a shiny starter! I just happened to get it. In the Nintendo Switch era, I Masuda Method just about everything or go for Pokémon GO shinies for their validity (more on this below). Yes, sometimes I do have to go outside.

If you know me, you know I am very stubborn with my game collection and how I play games. I only play in Japanese on my main saves. And (in the Nintendo Switch era) I must own the physical Japanese copy of the game. So all of my Pokémon are Japanese. The only exceptions are Gen VII and Gen IX where I have alternate saves in Korean and either Traditional or Simplified Chinese.

I have thousands of Pokémon in my collection. As such, sorting through them is actually quite hard. Pokémon HOME's mobile app provides labels but those disappear once you transfer a Pokémon into a game. So I mainly use markings to categorise my Pokémon.

A lot of people use these for IVs. I don't. All 6 markings and their colours have a special meaning to me. Here's a table of those meanings:

	Meaning (Blue)		Meaning (Red)
●	5 Perfect IVs (31) + 1 Almost Perfect (30)	●	6 Perfect IVs (all around good)
▲	Miracle Trade	▲	Friend Trade (Valuable!)
■	4 Perfect IVs	■	Square Shiny / Ultra Shiny
♥︎	Valued Teammate	♥︎	Starter
★	5 Perfect IVs	★	Unused
♦︎	Wild Tera Battle	♦︎	Dynamax Raid Tera Raid Battle Raid Battle (GO)

All shiny Pokémon that come from GO have an XOR of their PID to 0 automatically making them a Square Shiny. So a ■ is guaranteed. I never nickname my Pokémon, with one exception being もくたん, my shiny Charizard. I do hold back on sending shinies from GO unless I absolutely have to. I don't believe they make the collection less valuable. But the Pokéball options in GO are quite limiting and I prefer to matchy-matchy =). GO shinies are also harder to gen so I treat that "G" mark as a seal of authenticity.