Players hoping to snag a Shadow Gible in the Pokemon GO Team Rocket Takeover event are getting annoyed with how rare the tiny land shark seems to be. Gible is a fairly popular Pokemon because it evolves into the deadly Garchomp, whose dual Dragon/Ground typing provides a competitive edge in the mainline Pokemon games where it isn't typically difficult to find.
The Pokemon GO Team Rocket Takeover even adds several new Shadow Pokemon that can be encountered when fighting Rocket Grunts. The even started on June 21, 2023, and it runs until June 25 at 11:59 p.m. This means players only have a short amount of time left to complete all the Special Research tasks.
A Reddit user going by the name buddy341 has shared their experience trying to catch a Shadow Gible in the latest Pokemon GO event. The user reports an estimated 250 encounters with Team GO Rocket Grunts without finding a single Shadow Gible. Some of the responders seem to have had more luck; one of the top comments reports encountering four Dragon Grunts in their daily 10-kilometer walk, with three of those having Shadow Gibles. According to a website shared by yet another commenter, the chances of encountering a Dragon Grunt is less than 1%.
Shadow Gible will hopefully hang on as a Shadow Pokemon for a little while so that more players will have a chance to catch it, but it seems like players are better off leaving the encounter to chance rather than grinding to try and get it. Interestingly, it appears that Gible is the more common Pokemon held by Dragon Grunts wherever players are lucky enough to encounter them; there is a 5% chance that the Grunt will be holding Alolan Exeggutor instead. Players may have had more luck with the Pokemon GO Solstice Horizons event, which sees them collecting a series of themed Pokemon and arguably makes Fomantis the focus.
As the Team Rocket Takeover event draws to a close, it is likely that a few Pokemon GO players out there will be disappointed, but for others it's just the luck of the draw. Due to its popularity, it is likely only a matter of time until the next Gible event, as the Dragon/Earth Pokemon has captured the imaginations of fans around the world. For example, one has even created a variant of Gible that has a final evolution called Garswamp and boasts the exceedingly rare Ground/Poison typing.
Pokemon GO is available on Android and iOS.