Abra Community Day: Play at Home Edition recap

Yesterday, April 25, the Abra Community Day took place from 11 am local time through 5 pm local time. We were supposed to get this Community Day back in March, but due to lockdown Niantic had postponed it. They made some temporary changes to how Community Day works to allow us to participate in it from anywhere, including at home. The changes that were in effect for this Play at Home Edition are the following:

• Community Day lasts for 6 hours instead of 3 hours. This is why it was from 11 am through 5 pm local time instead of until 2 pm.
• 3x Catch Stardust bonus
• Incense lasts for 3 hours for the duration of the event instead of Lures
• Buddy Pokémon with a Great Buddy Level (2 hearts), or higher will bring items like Poké Balls throughout the event.
• Take a snapshot for a surprise encounter

I have had my Buddy regularly bring me a gift indeed which always contained 51 Poké Balls. Taking a snapshot of your Buddy gave an Abra as a surprise encounter, which you could do up to 5 times during the event to get 5 additional Abra spawns that way. With the Community Day taking place Shiny Abra, Kadabra and Alakazam have finally been properly added to the game. There has been an accidental release of Shiny Abra during an event in the past where some lucky people were able to encounter it, though that was fixed fast. From now on everyone can encounter it Shiny.

Evolving Kadabra into Alakazam during the event or up to two hours after the event teaches it the Community Day Exclusive Fast Attack: Counter.

A special April Community Day Box was available as a one-time purchase with 30 Ultra Balls, 3 Super Incubators, 3 Incense and 1 Elite Charged TM for 1280 PokéCoins. This Elite Charged TM allows you to change one Charged Attack from a Pokémon to any Charged Attack to your choice from its current and legacy Charged Attacks. Which allows you to teach a move to a Pokémon that is no longer available now.

A few days before the event a special ticket was released, which remained available for purchase until the event of the Community Day, for $1 or equivalent pricing in local currency, so €0.99 for me. This ticket gave access to the Community Day exclusive Special Research story "Investigating Illussions". This Special Research story gave 13,000 Stardust in rewards, some XP, Abra Candy, a Poffin, a Rocket Radar and several encounters with Abra, one with Kadabra and one with Alakazam. It also gave a medal from the event to show you've bought it. I bought this one as I had a little bit of money on my Google Play balance with which I could buy it, and I wanted to give it a try.

I was quite tired so I didn't want to start at 11 am. Instead I decided to start much later and combine it with an afternoon walk. I saw a bunch of other people playing, whilst maintaining a proper social distance from each other. Much less than I would normally encounter during a Community Day but still a fairly decent amount. Luckily in the city center there is enough place near most of the the Pokéstops and Gyms for everyone to keep a good distance, especially because we wouldn't walk together so people would be at different Pokéstops.

Due to starting much later it was more like a normal Community Day for me in total hours. I was able to encounter a total of 4 Shiny Abra. It did take me a long time to encounter the first one. You can see all 4 of them in this screenshot.

From the Special Research Investigating Illusions I got some Abra encounters, one Kadabra encounter and one Alakazam encounter. This Alakazam knows the Community Day Exclusive move too as you can see here that it has Counter as Fast Attack.

This move is not that ideal for Alakazam as it doesn't benefit from STAB and there are many better Pokémon with Fighting-type moves to be used for fighting in Gyms and Raids. However there might be some potential in this move for PvP. Where it could be nice when Alakazam faces off against Dark-type Pokémon where it would be weak against but could deal stronger damage to now, and also against for example Normal- or Steel-type Pokémon. I haven't tried it out yet. Apparently this Alakazam can reach exactly 1500 CP if I power it up, which would only be about 10,000 Stardust. I might give it a try sometime if I do more PvP.

Due to this move not being that great for a maxed out Alakazam I didn't evolve one of my best Abra to Alakazam for this move. In fact I evolved no Abra for Alakazam for this move, except when I had to evolve a Kadabra to Alakazam for a quest, but I transferred that one as I evolve a bad one. I also didn't evolve a Shiny Abra yet, I might do it though just to have them in the Pokédex. I had no Abra with really good stats for PvP in either Great or Ultra League so I really had no reason to evolve any Abra to Alakazam during the event for the exclusive move, considering I already had one from the Special Research reward. If I get an Abra with better stats for PvP than this current Alakazam then I'll keep it to evolve in December if the move turns out good.

The past few days I have been having some issues with my phone properly charging. I wonder if this is a problem with my phone itself, or with the two cables I have. Sometimes it just stops charging while I walk around, and often struggles to make it start charging again. I doubt it's got anything to do with the powerbank because even in the power socket it doesn't always start charging until I reposition it and the cable. I think I might have bent the cables a bit too often when I had the powerbank in my front pocket several times when I bent over to untie my shoes. The store I got these from are currently closed, so I will have to check their online shop to see if they deliver them. I really hope the issue is with the cables and not my phone, cause it makes it more difficult to play now.

How has your Abra Community Day been?