Building one of the largest online Pokémon trading markets in German-speaking Europe
I first discovered the world of Shiny Pokémon by sheer accident. During a playthrough of Pokémon Pearl, I encountered a Ponyta with a mane of blue flames instead of orange. At the time, internet information about Pokémon wasn't nearly as complete or accessible as it is today. Thinking it was a glitch, I looked it up—and discovered the concept of Shiny Pokémon, extremely rare variants with altered color palettes. Their odds of appearing back then were 1 in 8192.
My curiosity turned into passion, and soon I was exploring online communities like pokefans.net, the largest German-speaking Pokémon platform at the time. First, I began by trading Shiny Pokémon through the in-game online features of Diamond and Pearl, once I had collected enough, I quickly transitioned to structured trading via pokefans.net.
Under the pseudonym Xangel, I built up my own marketplace on the forum (back then this included writing extensive HTML files), gradually expanding my collection from 20 carefully obtained Shinies to over 500 unique specimens. These ranged from regular Shinies to extremely rare ones with special genetics ("DV"), optimized stats ("EV"), or exclusive event Pokémon distributed during real-world promotions.
To stay ahead of regional limitations, I established a network of international friends - which I had made online - , allowing me to acquire event Pokémon from Japan months before their European release.
Then there were physical events, places where one needed to go to local stores and receive physical event cards with codes on them, to download event pokemon. I went to every game store in my city to collect free event download codes, which I then redistributed or traded online.
At its peak, my marketplace was one of the top five biggest and most active trading hubs on pokefans.net. I had to managed high-demand (often 1 to 2hrs of trading per day, while in school), negotiated trades, and cultivated a reputation for reliability.
As I dug deeper into game mechanics, I learned to use PRNG abuse (pseudo-random number generator manipulation) to reliably catch Shinies. In Pokémon games, encounters and Pokémon attributes are not truly random—they're determined by predictable pseudo-random number sequences based on initial game parameters.
By identifying these initial factors and understanding how the game advanced its internal frame counter (e.g., every 0.0167 seconds), one could predict when and where Shinies would appear. This involved subtle in-game movements and timing tricks to hit the correct "frame," making shiny hunting far more efficient—though still a challenge.
Eventually, the new generations of Pokémon games started to loose my interest, and with that I retreated from the shiny collectors scene - till this day having probably over 500 rare shiny and event pokemon.