It’s incredibly rare to encounter a Shiny Pokémon in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. It’s even rarer to encounter two in a row in the same battle. Several thousand times rarer, in fact. But that’s exactly what happened to one Twitch streamer when he was least expecting it.
Mitchell “MitchOG” Versari was after a Shiny Turtwig, Pokémon BDSP’s grass starter. Streaming for his viewers on Twitch, he restarted the game again and again waiting for the sparkling colour variant to appear. On his 107th attempt, it finally did, but only after a Shiny Starly appeared in battle alongside it. Players have a one in 4,096 chance of their starter Pokémon being Shiny when it first appears. They have a one in 16,777,216 chance of both the starter and the first Pokémon it fights being Shiny.
“What?” MitchOG kept shouting as he fell out of his chair. “Merry Fucking Christmas Boys!”
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While Shiny Pokémon don’t have any special traits outside of their sparkly appearance and significant rarity, it’s become common practice for some devoted players to at the very least wait for a Shiny to pop up before starting a new Pokémon game in earnest. But it’s practically unheard of to get a double-Shiny encounter in the opening moments of the game.
“I couldn’t even process what I was looking at honestly,” MitchOG told Kotaku. “It wasn’t until later that night after the stream that I realised I’ve never seen this happen before. I started looking for others online that have found both the uncatchable shiny Starly and a shiny starter Pokémon at the same time but I couldn’t find anything.”
The lighting-in-a-bottle moment came during MitchOG’s latest Challenge Run to beat Pokémon BDSP using only a team of the first six Shiny Pokémon he can find. Prior to that, he streamed a playthrough where he beat the entire game using only a Bidoof. Longterm, he’s trying to capture one of every Shiny Pokémon in the series’ current Pokédex. There are over 800, and he says he’s about halfway there.
In the meantime, he’s achieved something even rarer. To put the odds of what happened to him in perspective, the average person is 1,000 times more likely to be hit by lightning during their lifetime.
“Safe to say I can retire from shiny hunting as the rest of my life’s luck was used yesterday,” said MitchOG.
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