an age-old fact about me is that i adore silver. the rival character from the original gold, silver and crystal pokemon games captured my attention completely when i was a kid. upon meeting him, i was amazed by his sheer cruelty - stealing his first partner pokemon and being mean to his team whenever he lost - but i had a feeling that there was more to him. that feeling ended up being correct, as silver's character developed through the games' respective plots, and he grows to become a fantastic trainer.

thanks to this amazing character development and his awesome design, i deemed silver my favourite pokemon character of all time - and, through the years, that hasn't changed in the slightest. i've talked about why silver is my favourite pokemon character on my pokemon favourites page and, honestly, may even make a small online shrine for him one day. but, really, what i wanted to do was play a pokemon game as an homage to this character who has come to mean so very much to me.

you guys know that i love taking on pokemon challenges. from the ribbon master challenge that i've repeatedly embarked on to my various badge quests, i just love playing pokemon games with unique goals. one challenge - the shiny dream team challenge - always intrigued me. not barred by limitations like the badge quest, the focus of a dream team challenge is to simply catch a team of shiny pokemon that you enjoy; your dream team of shinies. i was considering this challenge alongside my ruminations for a playthrough somehow devoted to silver, and... the idea just clicked into place.

i'd put a spin on a shiny dream team challenge and, instead, embark on a challenge to catch silver's team as a full shiny team.

naturally, this challenge had to be done in a johto game! i had a few options here, but gen4's heartgold won me over. i had an unplayed cart of it and, frankly, hgss is my favourite pokemon game duo of all time. i also liked how it referenced the pure hearts and rainbow wings event from pokemon masters, which was absolutely huge for me, haha. either way, all of the johto-focused games have the old school 1/8192 chance of running into a shiny pokemon... so this challenge was going to be... well, a Challenge!

i outlined my personal rules for the challenge in very simple terms. there's only really the masuda method for increasing your chance of running into a shiny pokemon in hgss (and thus 'improve' the 1/8192 odds), but, at that point, i was no stranger to full odds hunts. frankly, they didn't intimidate me anymore. as such, i decided to go all-in and get silver's team as full odds shinies. (yes, this was hubris. believe me. i know. LOL.) i also decided that i'd take on these hunts as single system hunts, since i'm still not too adept at using multiple screens in shiny hunting (this year's safari week aside). that then raised the question of what my targets would actually be. i found this handy page by bulbapedia user amiosi listing a ton of pokemon characters' pokemon teams in beautifully coded tables. one such character was silver, and here is a cropped screenshot of the compiled table:

for the purposes of this challenge, i decided to focus on silver's main team - not the pokemon featured in side games like stadium 2 and masters ex. does this mean that i have no plans to shiny hunt ho-oh, lugia, mewtwo, and tyranitar? absolutely not. you can almost certainly expect a part 2 to this post in the future. :') but for the purposes of this post, we're looking at the standard and starter pokemon. i started up a fresh file of heartgold, naming my character 'Silver' and setting off into new bark town.

did you know that johto's starter pokemon are the best starter trio in the franchise? yeah. facts are facts.

HAHA, personal biases aside - totodile is my favourite pokemon of all time (as you probably know if you've ever peeked in the totodile zone section of this site), so i was really excited to be able to shiny hunt for one. the hgss starter hunt is actually lauded as a very friendly one for people who are new to full odds shiny hunting, since you can see if you have a shiny pokemon at the starter select screen rather than needing to button mash your way through a bunch of long cutscenes or battles. you just have to save in front of the pokeball-holding machine in elm's lab, then press a, check chikorita, totodile and cyndaquil... and, if you didn't get a shiny, reset and repeat these steps until you find one. this also meant that you can see three pokemon per reset, which significantly streamlines the shiny hunt. (encounters are so fast for this shiny hunt that many people actually accidentally reset prematurely over a shiny pokemon. so many shiny chikoritas ran away from their trainers... so many...)

with this speedy encounter rate in mind (and because i am slightly insane), i decided to even out the odds somewhat and go for one of each starter pokemon.

this was honestly a pretty scary choice. while i'd be able to see 3 pokemon per reset, there was a very real chance that i'd run into one or two shiny starters repeatedly, with the lone remaining shiny pokemon evading me for thousands upon thousands of encounters. this could potentially get me stuck in elm's lab for a really long period of time. i knew that the challenge would still be #Valid if i simply went for the first starter pokemon that sparkled, since silver only has one starter pokemon per playthrough anyway. but that kinda felt like i was taking the easy way out, and the whole point of this challenge was to Not do that.

(again: i am slightly insane.)

while setting up for this challenge, i decided to test some soft resets on my dsi. (later on, i'd opt to swap to my 3ds xl since the soft reset button combination was easier on my hands that way.) you would literally never believe my surprise when i ran into this little one on my third reset.

MY THIRD RESET.

i saw a total of nine starters and, bam: shiny chikorita. i think this encounter is probably the luckiest i'll ever get for an intentional hunt in a 1/8192 game. in further crazy news, this chikorita is also a girl! for some weird reason, starters have a 87.5% chance of being male and a 12.5% chance of being female. that ratio made this little chiko all the more rare!

i was with my mom at the time, so i asked her to name chikorita for me. she told me that chikorita was definitely a 'buttercup' - and i agreed completely!

were it not for my decision to shiny hunt all 3 starters, i would've been done with this segment of the challenge already! alas, my journey had just begun. i traded buttercup over to my main soulsilver file to keep her safe and restarted my heartgold file. i had a totodile and a cyndaquil to find!

hilariously enough, it didn't take long to find my next johto starter. i was curled up in bed doing some resets before going to sleep, and an absolute icon decided to show his face.

3816 starter encounters (1272 resets!) after buttercup showed up, a shiny totodile greeted me warmly! i found scallop the totodile a mere two days after i found buttercup, and underodds to boot. i was thrilled!

i felt incredibly lucky, and since totodile is my favourite pokemon, i was beyond thrilled to have my very first gen4 shiny totodile. i decided that i'd keep scallop as this file's official starter rather than trading him over to my main copy of soulsilver and restarting the heartgold file. this meant that i had to shiny hunt for my next starter on my second copy of soulsilver (i have 2 copies of soulsilver and 1 copy of heartgold).

the cozy vibes were simply unmatched. this juxtaposed with the pressure i was suddenly under, however. i was now only missing cyndaquil. would i phase on another chikorita or another totodile? i had a 1/3 chance to actually get my target shiny, and even though i was underodds so far, the thought of long phases still scared me a whole lot.

let's just say that fear was... somewhat founded.

12615 pokemon later, i was 4000+ encounters overodds when i finally ran into another shiny... and that shiny was none other than totodile number two!

honestly, i wasn't mad. how could i be? totodile is my favourite pokemon, and my chances of getting out of this part of the challenge without phasing were hilariously low. not gonna lie, i also lowkey really, really wanted a spare one to keep unevolved (since i was 100% set on evolving scallop up into a feraligatr for my silver team quest). i was also really happy to run into a shiny in general, as 12615 set a record for my longest phase. (little did i know that this record would get absolutely smashed... but i digress...)

i was working out when i ran into grotto the totodile, and i was so shocked i almost fell off the treadmill, haha. once i passed the 10k mark for encounters i was convinced that this hunt would go up to 20k. i'm relieved it didn't! but, anyway - i traded grotto over to my main soulsilver file... and also did something pretty cool.

yeah, i know - grotto isn't technically part of the silver team quest - but i wanted to show him off in my pokewalker anyway! later on, i'd put buttercup in my other pokewalker and the two actually got to hang out a bit.

my quest for the final starter pokemon continued.

days passed...

weeks passed...

months passed...

and... 14721 encounters later...

i was freed.

i found my shiny cyndaquil literally RIGHT BEFORE i was about to go to bed, and it was such a shock!! an absolute wild scramble! i was so happy to finally run into the final shiny johto starter that i needed!

cinnamon the cyndaquil absolutely zoomed past the record that grotto the totodile set - 14721 pokemon were seen in total before he showed up. of course, that 14721 refers to the starters i saw after i phased on grotto. between scallop the totodile and cinnamon the cyndaquil, i saw around 27k pokemon! this made cinnamon the longest shiny hunt i've ever done in terms of pure encounters. at least i was seeing three at a time...!

here are the total numbers for each of my starter pokemon encountered in this segment of the challenge. it was absolutely wild that i had both my shortest and longest hunts in elm's lab for the SAME quest, and i knew it meant that this challenge would continue to be a wild ride. the increase in encounters for each phase was lowkey the stuff of shiny hunting nightmares, but i definitely can't complain, as i only phased once - and it was on my favourite pokemon.

morever, i could finally step out of professor elm's lab and into the sunlight! back in my heartgold file, grotto and i hustled past the early game tutorials and made it to cherrygrove, where i traded cinnamon and buttercup over to meet him. my first three pokemon of the silver team quest were officially with me. it was time to tackle all the other pokemon in silver's team!

the next pokemon available in silver's team was none other than gengar. according to bulbapedia, sprout tower is home to tons of gengar's pre-evolution, gastly: at night, there is a whopping 85% chance of encountering them on the second and third floors of the tower. that meant that there was also a 15% chance of me phasing on a shiny rattata. intially, i considered getting around this by doing a level 6 repel trick, but it ended up making the encounters abysmally slow. like, seriously. i decided to test fate and open my heart up to a rattata phase.

at this point, it was december 2024. i was taking on two full odds shiny hunts simultaneously: this current gastly one and a turbo controller hunt for a shiny fennekin as my starter in pokemon x. (i got the turbo controller for christmas a few days prior and wanted to revisit kalos in preparation for plza's release.) on december 29th, i got my shiny fennekin - and it was incredible. truly. i know that this little fennekin is irrelevant to the silver team quest, but look at him. just look at him. he's TOO CUTE.

still riding the metaphorical high of getting a target shiny (underodds at 1746 fennekins seen, btw), i went on my treadmill and booted up pokemon heartgold, ensuring that my system clock was set to night-time and ready to get some gastly encounters in.

lady luck was apparently smiling down at me on this day, because - less than an hour after getting my shiny fennekin - a gastly with a distinctly blue aura decided to greet me.

my 3926th gastly seen sparkled! even though cinnamon was asleep thanks to a previous gastly managing to get a lucky hypnosis in, i can tell you that i was wide awake.

i named this gastly 'pepper' and welcomed him to the team. underodds and arriving on my first phase of the shiny hunt, it was truly a blessing to see him! over time, i evolved him into a haunter.

i then went on to trade him to my soulsilver file (and back to heartgold) in order to evolve him into a gengar.

i know that genger's shiny is a point of contention in the fandom, but i actually really like it. over time, i've come to appreciate the subtle shiny designs more and more, and the more desaturated look for gengar is pretty cool!

with pepper on my team, i moved on to my next target for the silver team quest!

my next target was crobat's pre-evolution, zubat. ironically, i had a higher chance of running into wild zubats in a well dedicated to a whole other species of pokemon. turns out that the little bats love cohabitating with slowpokes. in the aptly named slowpoke well, you have an 85% chance of running into a zubat and a 15% chance of running into a slowpoke; again, shoutout to bulbapedia for giving me these percentages. i raced through the game's plot, grabbing my first badge and getting started on the team rocket plotline on the outskirts of azalea town.

even though i had a 15% chance of running into a slowpoke, i really didn't mind at all. slowpoke is one of my favourite pokemon ever, so i really welcomed a phase for this particular hunt. while i was watching jerma stream the sims 2, and on my 3604th encounter down in the well... i found my first shiny.

my shiny zubat turned up on the first phase of the hunt - and very underodds, to boot! this combined with the magic of watching jerma play my favourite sims game made for a truly amazing experience.

i named the zubat 'rosemary' and immediately began babying him. like, more than i would typically baby a newly caught shiny pokemon (which is a truly heightened amount of babying to begin with). why, you ask? well, there's definitely a bit of a story here.

gen2 of the pokemon games introduced affection-based evolutions. one such pokemon with an affection-based evolution is zubat's evolution, golbat. zubats evolve into golbat in the standard level-up process, with the transformation happening at level 22. however, as of gen2, golbat got a new evolution: crobat. in order to get your golbat to evolve into crobat, it has to hit a certain threshold of affection for you. only then will it evolve into the Absolutely Awesome final form of the line.

back in gen2, gamefreak brilliantly used this new method of evolution in order to highlight a key part of silver's development as a character. like i briefly mentioned at the start of this post, when you first meet silver, he is truly messed up. he's fixated on becoming the strongest pokemon trainer he can be, cruelly pushing his pokemon to their absolute limits and demeaning them when they failed to beat the protagonist in battle. however, over time, he softens. silver begins realising what true strength is; he begins seeing his pokemon as his friends - not as tools for power. determined to be a trainer who can bring out the best in his team, he begins unlearning the harmful belief system instilled from him at such a young age, and, in doing so, achieves his - and his beloved team's - true potential. just in case you weren't keeping up with silver's textual growth via the storyline, gamefreak made it evident. at a certain point, silver sends out a crobat - signifying that his golbat grew to adore him so much that it evolved into its gorgeous friendship evolution.

this blew my mind as a kid. it was the very first time a pokemon character got this sort of treatment, and i genuinely thought it was incredibly poetic and a fantastic way of showcasing the bond between a pokemon and its trainer. pokemon games have used friendship evolutions in a similar manner over the years for various other characters, but silver was the first rival/faux-"antagonist" to ever do it. in my humble opinion, this was also the best case of it, given the slow burn of his development as a character across the game's plot.

with this in mind, i was very keen on getting rosemary to evolve into a crobat as quickly as possible. after giving him lots of haircuts in goldenrod city and running around with him a bunch in the overworld, he did just that.

crobat's shiny is just... peak. i gotta say it. it's PEAK. not only is this pokemon a #Deep one in terms of the affection-based evolution, it's also just... beautifully designed - shiny or not. it's one of my favourites, and i was beyond proud to give rosemary a permanent spot on my team.

now in goldenrod, i was faced with two options for finding the pre-evolution of silver's alakazam. i could find a wild shiny abra that would almost certainly teleport away after evading me for thousands of encounters, or i could roll up to the game corner and try my hand at voltorb flip (since abra is available as a prize there for 200 coins and is thankfully not shiny locked).

we've established that i'm kind of crazy, but i'm not that crazy. i chose the latter option.

i was a complete newbie to voltorb flip, having never played it before. (sacreligious, i know...) i got to work on grinding up the coins necessary for abra, and came to realise that i was impressively bad at it. like, wow. just absolutely terrible.

my absolute ineptitude at voltorb flip aside, this shiny hunt was pretty simple to set up. first, i had to grind 1000 coins in voltorb flip. then i emptied my party of all of my pokemon, save for the 1 you have to take with you so that you're not an unaccompanied trainer. i then saved in front of the prize-giving npc inside of the game corner. after that, i cashed in my 1000 coins, neatly having enough to add 5 abras to my party. i'd then check the abras' status screens to see if i managed to get a shiny one. if i didn't, i'd soft reset the game and cash in my coins once more.

as you know, i ran into both pepper and rosemary waaay before hitting 8192 pokemon seen. i was hoping for this underodds shiny trend to continue.

alas, it was not meant to be.

but i stayed strong, and a shiny abra showed up on my 10210th abra checked!

i wasn't sure what to name this abra; i was torn between 'amulet' or 'coin' as a reference to the in-game item, the amulet coin. my friend paige suggested that i flip a coin in order to choose between the two, and coin won in the end!

i quickly evolved coin into a kadabra.

once that was handled, it was time to trade him over to my soulsilver file so that he could evolve into his final form: alakazam.

coin is my second full-odds shiny alakazam, since i got one as part of my leafgreen badge quest (shoutout to grimoire!). regardless, seeing this awesome shiny never gets old.

next up on the list was silver's magneton. its pre-evolution, magnemite, could be found on route 38... but this was another random encounter hunt, like my hunts for pepper and rosemary. moreover, the phase potential for this hunt was absolutely brutal. in addition to magnemite, this route features a plethora of awesome pokemon: rattata, raticate, farfetch’d, miltank, tauros, and snubbull. i didn't mind phasing on any of these pokemon, really; a shiny farfetch’d, miltank, tauros, and/or snubbull would be absolutely fantastic. but i knew that getting my actual target was the goal, so i got to work on devising a way of minimising this truly astounding phase potential.

first things first, i wanted to make use of the static pokemon ability. in hgss, static boosts your encounter rate for electric type pokemon by 50%. since magnemite is an electric type, this was obviously ideal. i took a quick detour to catch a cute little mareep named sparkles, whom i evolved into a flaafy. (this is because mareep and flaafy both have the static ability.)

in addition to using static, i also did the repel trick. by keeping sparkles in the first slot of my team and at level 15, whenever i popped a repel, pokemon under level 15 would stay away from me - namely, miltank, tauros, and snubbull (;_;). since magnemites, rattatas, raticates and farfetch'ds are all level 16 here, i could still phase on four other pokemon, though.

FINALLY, i ALSO gave sparkles a smoke ball (which i traded over from my copy of soulsilver) so that he could run away from battles without needing to worry about outspeeding the wild pokemon - especially since he was stuck at level 15 in order for the repel trick to work. this sped up the encounter process by… A LOT!!!

here is sparkles in his fully set-up glory.

despite the level of precaution i was taking for this hunt, i knew that phasing was a very real possibility. according to the pokemon encounter calculator, with all of this set up, i had a roughly 63% chance of encountering magnemites while on this route. i had a ~15% chance of encountering a rattata, a ~15% chance of encountering a raticate, and a 5% chance of encountering a farfetch'd. my odds were pretty good, but they weren't as merciful as the previous random encounter hunts that i took on during this challenge.

i ended up seeing this firsthand when i ran into this little darling.

this raticate showed up very quickly into the hunt! he was my 1237th encounter on the route, and i was working out on the treadmill when he showed his face... hence the blurriness of the picture, LOL. i had a good laugh and named him 'chilan' after the berry he was holding.

i hoped that magneton would show up just as underodds as chilan.

but, again: it was not meant to be.

much like in my previous shiny hunt for coin, i zoomed past the 8192 encounters mark. i kept on running back and forth in that tall grass, poppin' repels like it was nobody's business...

and passed the 10k encounters mark.

then i passed the 12k encounters mark.

once i hit 14000, i wondered if magnemite wanted to break cinnamon's record for my longest phase. thankfully, the little magnemite had other plans.

my 14704th encounter on the route was a shiny magnemite! mind you, cyndaquil took 14721 encounters, so, really, they almost broke his record... needless to say, they didn't, and i was overjoyed. again, i was watching jerma stream when this magnemite turned up. he is literally like a good luck charm, i swear.

i named magnemite 'mobile' and added them to my party, exhausted from such a long hunt. (even though mobile didn't break cinnamon's record, keep in mind that i was seeing 3 pokemon per reset for cinnamon. i was seeing each encounter one at a time for mobile!)

interestingly enough, silver only evolves his magnemite once in hgss, opting to keep them as a magneton. it's understandable for gold, silver and crystal, as magnezone (magneton's evolution) didn't exist in gen2 and would only Come To Be in gen4 itself. even though hgss is part of gen4, i suppose gamefreak wanted to keep silver's hgss team as true to his original one as possible. you can also see this in action for the next target of my silver team quest.

aside from his starter pokemon (typically a member of the totodile family), silver tends to be depicted with a sneasel. stolen from a man in cianwood city (who you as the protagonist can then go on to get a shuckle from, btw), this sneasel is one of silver's quintessential pokemon.

sneasel is also one of my absolute favourite pokemon. as a kid, i really, really wanted one on my main team. i wouldn't be able to use one in gold or silver, however, as, unfortunately, sneasels aren't available until the post-game plot in kanto. despite crystal version amending this and letting sneasels frolic about in johto's ice path, hgss stuck true to gold and silver... and you can only run into sneasels in the post-game as a wild encounter in mt. silver.

this posed a huge hurdle to my silver team challenge, as i really wanted to experience the plot of the game with silver's pokemon. even if i could use buttercup or cinnamon as my 6th slot pokemon and still technically be using shinies based on silver's team, being added to the johto hall of fame with silver's sneasel missing felt... wrong.

there was only one option, really. and, frankly, it was a horrifying as it was necessary.

i'd resort to hatching eggs.

you might think that i'm being dramatic. i wish i was. i've done a lot of ambitious shiny hunts over the years, but i steered clear of hatching eggs for a shiny in a 1/8192 game for a reason. that reason being... that each encounter takes forever. between getting the eggs to generate in the daycare, then biking back and forth between route 34 (where the daycare is located) and goldenrod city to get the eggs to hatch... it's a lot. this is especially the case when you consider how hgss features The Slowest Bike In The Series (whoo!).

to say i wasn't happy about taking this hunt on is an understatement. but i thought of myself as a little kid, searching johto far and wide for sneasels in my copy of silver version to no avail, and... i knew what i had to do.

i traded over a wild sneasel that i caught in my main copy of soulsilver (since that file is in the post-game). i placed him in the daycare with a ditto that i caught in heartgold and got to work on collecting eggs. i used a slugma with flame body, whom i fittingly nicknamed Warm, in order to speed up the egg-hatching process.

several egg-filled months passed.

if i was watching a movie, i was collecting sneasel eggs. if i was watching a stream, i was collecting sneasel eggs. it was madness. i spent countless summer nights watching jerma's elden ring vods while meeting thousands upon thousands of sneasels.

i really and truly hoped that this hunt would not be one to go overodds. surely it won't, i thought to myself. i'd gone overodds for mobile and coin. three overodds hunts, one after the other, was kind of ridiculous.

but the shiny sneasel knew how badly i wanted them, and they were not about to come home without one hell of a fight.

november 2025 eventually rolled around, and i caught a pesky little cold that i couldn't quite shake off. i decided to lock in on sneasel encounters while i was sick; if i wasn't sleeping, i was resting by watching dozens of titanic documentaries as well as the Hit Tv Show peaky blinders (i'm still not done with it). i went overodds on this hunt, and my friend rachel joked that i was populating the ice path single-handedly in hgss due to the sheer volume of sneasels that i was releasing into the wild. but i was determined to find the shiny, and Things were happening.

on november 19th, i pulled this shiny weavile in tcgp. like i mentioned in the previous section for mobile, silver doesn't evolve his sneasel into weavile in hgss despite this gen4 evolution being available in the game. regardless, it kinda spooked me, given how many sneasels i was hatching. surely, it was a sign.

i gathered a powerful squad of plushes and kept on gathering eggs. it was only when i picked up egg 11038 that i finally, finally met my target pokemon.

after hundreds of hours spent looking for one, i finally hatched a shiny sneasel. i don't think any previous shiny i've ever found ever got such an intense reaction out of me, except maybe my starter totodile in gen2. i shrieked, sore throat be damned. sneasel was home!!!

i named this darling little sneasel 'ixora' after a flower that grows on my home island. as a child, i used to play with these flowers really often - making bracelets out of them and eating their nectar. i thought it was a fitting name, as it linked this quest's sneasel to my ill-fated childhood quest for one. furthermore, sneasel's shiny design reminded me a lot of the flower itself.

my hype for this sneasel was only compounded by the fact that she was the final member of silver's main team. at long last, i had assembled each and every one of my targets for the silver team quest. moreover, i found her on the 20th of november: 1 day before gold and silver's anniversary on the 21st.

this challenge really, really tested me! i think i approached it with an incredible amount of hubris, largely thanks to how lucky i was for my leafgreen badge quest! but i had a whole lot of fun doing it, and i'm actually really glad that this first part of it lasted me for over a year. silver is always going to be my favourite pokemon character - hell, he's always going to be my favourite character. this file of heartgold is a true testament to how much i adore him, and i can safely say that i successfully achieved my goal in honoring him.

and, yes: it's really, really funny battling the in-game rival silver with a team that essentially mirrors his. HAHA.

anyway, here are the cohesive final counts for this part of my silver team quest (phases included).

buttercup the meganium - 9 starters seen
scallop the feraligatr - 3816 starters seen
grotto the totodile (phase) - 12615 starters seen
cinnamon the typhlosion - 14721 starters seen
pepper the gengar - 3926 encounters
rosemary the crobat - 3604 encounters
coin the alakazam - 10210 abras seen
chilan the raticate (phase) - 1237 encounters
mobile the magneton - 14704 encounters
ixora the sneasel - 11038 eggs

total pokemon seen: 75880

like i said before, i am definitely going to try my hand at catching the pokemon that silver has in side-games. until then, i hope you enjoyed the Epic Tale behind each and every main team member of my silver team challenge!