Pokemon Shiny Hunter Unsure How To Raise Foil Card Odds

GURNEE, IL — A fervor has fallen over local game store Riverside Comics and Games, as local Pokemon Shiny Hunter and newfound TCG collector Miguel Norton had gone to extraordinary lengths to try and open a foil card.

“I’ve seen some weird superstition and gamesmanship over the years for people wanting foils,” says store owner Tomas Angelos, “picking the center pack, electric scales, blind flips. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone eat an entire pickle and cucumber hoagie for luck!”

Shiny hunting, the practice of collecting rare alternate color Pokemon across the series’ games, is often accompanied with certain specific methods of increasing one’s odds of finding one. When Commander’s Herald caught up with Norton, he was on a public bench at 5:30 in the morning, waiting for daybreak so that “the Pokemon will re-roll” as he put it. “I haven’t fully cracked the mechanics yet, but I know there has to be a way to get them to spawn more often.”

However, some of these attempts have come at the expense of other store patrons. “He was up there repeatedly pulling packs out with a fishing rod yesterday” says one local player. “He just kept tossing the packs that didn’t have a foil and saying he was ‘increasing his chain’. No one could get in or out until he pulled one after 40 attempts. The shop still smells like curry from his foil hunting experiments last weekend.”

At time of writing, Norton had resorted to leaving booster boxes of different languages at a local pet-sitter service. He hopes his “Masuda Approach” will grant him a half dozen boxes to open by next week. When asked if he had opened anything of value, Norton did note the boosters of Magic: the Gathering he had opened. “There was a shiny Ragavan in one of the packs. Unfortunately it had a Hasty nature, so I decided to box it.”