The Pokémon competitive scene waits for nobody. If you want to get your Pokémon Sword and Shield teams bred and ready as soon as possible, you’d better have a rubber band or ruler handy for egg hatching.

Generation VIII of Pokémon is officially underway. As we speak, on millions of TVs and/or Switch screens around the world, fans are roaming the lush, green rolling hills of Galar. The games were certainly controversial in the run-up to release, what with the National Dex and move animation drama, but they’ve been the barnstorming success that anything with the Pokémon name attached always will be.

How have you been enjoying your Galar experience to date, Pokémon fans? Are you taking the time to capture every little critter in every route and explore every nook and cranny of every town? Alternatively, are you barreling through the story as quickly as possible in order to reach the true meat of the package: competitive play?

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Via: GamersHeroes

Game Freak have taken gradual steps to make the whole process of building competitive teams less cumbersome, but the act of hatching eggs itself is still very time consuming. It means a lot of completely impractical cycling around your preferred area in order to travel enough steps for said egg to hatch. If you were one of those players who put a coin under your 3DS’s circle pad to ‘auto-cycle,’ you’ll be interested to know that, this generation, it’s all about rubber bands and bendy rulers.

Resourceful Redditors have been showing off their egg-hatching innovations. Hellcree has opted for the classic ‘rubber band on the analog sticks’ solution:

Meanwhile, KanlayaYaya has gone for the more creative yet potentially less reliable bendy ruler approach:

While we’re not sure we’d want to mess with the Switch’s analog sticks like this (with their penchant for drifting), this would certainly save us a lot of cycling around the Wild Area.

Many younger Pokémon players are sure to be content with simply becoming champion, however many of the old guard are here to unlock everything and get to competitive battling. If you’re one of those players, you’ll know that a world of breeding, leveling and not-EV-training-anymore awaits you. And if you cause a few Joy-Cons to drift due to improper rubberband use in the process, well that's a small price to pay for victory.

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