With the start of the World of Wonders season, the Pokémon GO Routes aficionado Mateo is now providing 7km eggs from gifts similar to those received from gifts from your friends. Although these eggs have the same design and walking distance, they have a very different egg pool with some relatively rare Pokémon, but with this comes a rather restricted way of obtaining these eggs leading to the question, are they worth the effort?
How to obtain these eggs
Let’s start by making something pretty clear, the chance of you obtaining one of these eggs through normal play and not actively going out of your way to get them is pretty slim. The reason for this is that these eggs will only use one of the nine standard egg slots, and not the three bonus slots usually reserved for eggs from Team GO Rocket leaders or as part of the Weekly Adventure Sync rewards. For players with Premium Incubators burning holes in their pocket, this might not be a problem, but players working off of a single Infinite Incubator may struggle to ensure they have a free space to receive one of these when completing a Route.
This is not just because of the Incubator limitation, but because of what Routes are by design. A line to follow on the map, starting and ending at a Pokéstop or Gym. We as players have spent the best part of 8 years trying to spin as many of these points of interest as possible, and that habit will likely result in picking up a different egg. So if you did happen to have a free egg slot when starting the route, the chances are you could have filled it by mistake before you’ve reached the end and found Mateo.
And that leads me to the final restriction on this process, Mateo himself will only appear on the first route you interact with per day. If you decide to end your route early before interacting with Mateo, he won’t appear in your game again until the next day. To top it all off, the eggs from Mateo’s gifts are not guaranteed!
So in summary, the way of obtaining these eggs requires you to:
- Have an open egg slot in your standard egg spaces.
- Start your first Route of the day.
- Not spin any stops while walking the Route.
- Exchange gifts with Mateo at the end of the Route.
- Hope that you receive an egg from the gift.
At the time of writing, I’ve managed to receive 10 eggs out of 21 attempts to follow this process. I’m going out of my way to try and get these eggs, but either accidentally spinning a stop that fills my egg space or just not receiving an egg from the gift exchange.
The Egg Pool
So what makes these eggs so special that they would require a convoluted and restricted method to obtaining? The current egg pool is… odd, to say the least. And every one of the Pokemon available can currently be obtained from other eggs or other methods.
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With the exception of Hisuian Sneasel, all of the Pokémon featured in the Route eggs have repeatable methods of obtaining more than once a day, despite some of those being more difficult for casual or rural players. Let’s not also forget that all of the Pokémon with the exception of Vullaby have been prominently featured in at least one global event in the last year. This makes the Effort vs. Reward ratio of collecting these Route eggs even more questionable.
In Conclusion
There is only one Pokemon available through these eggs which currently makes the effort potentially worth it, and I’m known to have some bias towards the Sneasel line as it is. These eggs would be absolutely fine as is if it was more likely that the average player would be able to receive one while following a route, and not just those like myself that have gone out of their way to do so. If the method of obtaining them isn’t going to change, then the egg pool absolutely has to to make these eggs worth the effort. I’m an advocate for making regional Pokemon more accessible to those that can’t travel, and having the regional Pokemon from the first few generations available as potential rewards would certainly, in my opinion, drive more players into making sure they walk a daily route and obtain one of these eggs.
Time will tell if a shakeup like this will happen, but for now, my closing statement is to get your eggs from other places, Mateo can keep these.