Pokémon Shuffle – Beginner’s Guide & Tips

Pokémon Shuffle, Nintendo’s newest free-to-play 3DS game, offers a broad variety of micro-transactions. Here’s how to not use it and have free fun with the game instead.

Save your money

First of all, you shouldn’t spend any money on Pokémon Shuffle, unless you feel the urgent need to do so. There are plenty of options to get jewels, like street passing and completing certain stages for the first time. I have to admit that the gameplay is really addicting, but you could take the approach of not spending any money as a challenge.

Using your hearts

Each game will consume on of five hearts, which is actually the maximum you can hold at one time. A heart needs 30 minutes to regenerate, giving you two-and-a-half hours to spend your time on your real life. Considering a healthy amount of sleep, you can at least get 20 hearts out of a day without big effort and, first and foremost, without spending a single coin.

Check in!

Do not forget to use the daily “Check In” function, as it gives you some extra coins for connecting with the system once a day. Normally, you will get 500 coins, but after every tenth visit, you will be rewarded with the double amount. That’s a pretty good reason to come back.

Wanna play tactical?

Don’t worry too much over techniques and strategies in the beginning. When you have caught 40 to 50 Pokémon, you can start thinking about boosting their combos by synchronising your team.

Don’t miss the events

When you look at the lower section of your screen, you can see the option to go to the Special Stages menu. There you can encounter Event Pokémon, like the legendary Mew at the moment. These are offered for a limited amount of time, so don’t forget to check this category regularly. Furthermore, you can encounter different Daily Pokémon, depending on which day of the week you play. At the moment, you can catch different forms of Rotum. Here’s a small list of when which type appears.

Monday – Ice / Tuesday – Fire / Wednesday – Water / Thursday – Grass / Friday – Flying

On Saturday and Sunday, you can play Meowth’s Coin Mania, providing you with some extra money to spend.

Balls are not necessary

No pun intended. The catch percentages might seem discouraging and low at the beginning, but there’s never a need to use a Great Ball. Instead, use high combos and more tries. This will level up your Pokémon and grant you some experience before you approach the harder stages.

Mega Evolutions are totally overpowered

Especially when fighting against strong Pokémon, using your Mega Evolution slot becomes crucial. As in Pokémon X and Y and Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, you can only carry one Mega Pokémon. The Mega forms always grant you some neat skills, like clearing entire lines and getting rid of nasty obstacles. If you really can’t manage to win against a hard enemy with great powers, use coins to boost up your Mega Evolution level at the beginning of the combat. Enemies tend to use the heavy attacks later in the game, so boosting it early provides you with a good way to stand up against them.

Type over level

You might want to level up your sweet Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle, but at most of the points you won’t be able to use them all at the same time effectively. It’s better to send three effective Level 1 Pokémon into battle, instead of using only high-levelled ones without an advantage. I’m sorry, Ash.

Do you have anything to add? Or do you want to show us your biggest Pokémon Shuffle achievements? Tell us here in the comments, or on Facebook! We’ve also created a very own support group for this purpose, which you can check out by clicking here.