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(Re)Designing The Shiny Keldeo Masterwork

With the next step of the Pony Tales Masterwork underway, I feel very disappointed and underwhelmed by the structure of this and most new Masterworks as of late. The current format they follow seems to be: an easy/medium difficulty task+time gated task on every step. This makes for low effort, low engagement gameplay, and ultimately makes my shiny Mythical feel less rewarding, since I didn’t actually work for it, I just waited. I decided to (re)design the Keldeo Masterwork, and not only balance the difficulty of tasks, but theme it around Keldeo’s hypothetical journey around the Unova region. I wanted to make the beginning slow to prevent people from racing through, the middle more involved to keep people actively playing, and the end are all long term goals you can technically work on before you get to those steps. 

Step 1: Befriending Pokémon 

-Catch 151 Pokémon originally from Kanto 

-Catch 100 Pokémon originally from Johto 

-Catch 135 Pokémon originally from Hoenn 

-Catch 107 Pokémon originally from Sinnoh

-Catch 156 Pokémon originally from Unova 

Step 2: Training with Swords of Justice

-Catch 638 Steel Types (Represents Cobalion)

-639 Rock Types (Represents Terrakion) 

-640 Grass Types (Represents Virizion)

-647 Water (Represents Keldeo)

-647 Fighting (Represents All)

Step 3: Defending Unova

-Reach 3 best buddies with fighting types (Represents the 3 Swords of Justice)

-Defend gyms for 153 hours (defending the Pokémon of Unova)

-Travel 153 Km (Traveling the Unova region)

Step 4: Fighting Team Plasma

-Purify 49 Pokémon (Rescue Pokémon from plasma)

-Defeat 7 rocket leaders (Represents the Seven Sages)

-Use 153 super effective fighting type charge moves (Unova dex no)

Step 5: The Unova League

-Win 25 Raid Battles (represents all Unova league fights between bw&b2w2)

-Gold Unova Medal (represents gym badges)

-Power up 3 Pokémon to their max cp (leveling up to battle the league)

Step 6: Becoming Champion

-Evolve a Larvesta (Represents Alder)

-Platinum Dragon Tamer Medal (Represents Iris)

-Reach level 70 (N’s Final battles in B2W2)

Step 7: Auto complete

I know we aren’t finished with the Pony Tales Masterwork just yet, but let me know how you would like this Masterwork over the one we currently have. Any feedback or tweaks are welcomed too.

After posting this to reddit and thinking it would be a hit, I think I realized I might have designed my ideal Masterwork. Even my girlfriend seemed to think it was a bit much. The only feedback on reddit was "this makes the masterwork research for jirachi look like an angel 😐". Which is really funny, because the Jirachi Masterwork is my favorite research of all time. I guess my desire to have harder Masterworks isn't exactly shared with the rest of the community online. Which is ok, but I still desire to be truly challenged from a Pokémon GO research again.