I Still Lament the Loss of Master League Classic

They call it "open" Master League, but it seems pretty exclusionary to me.

My 98% IV Yveltal basically only sees the light of day against Rocket Grunts. A Legendary Pokémon reduced to benchwarmer status. How disappointing.

In a nearly immediate rejoinder to my expressed wonder at what, pray tell, Pokémon GO players were supposed to “rediscover” in Niantic’s eponymous campaign, the California-based developer unveiled the first phase of this initiative with an overhaul of the game’s avatar customization interface. The reviews have been, ahem, mixed. Since I’m considering this a developing story and since there’s—as serious essayists would say—a lot to unpack here, I’m going to postpone any analysis of the changes and the resulting feedback for at least another week. Needless to say, though, the company’s exhortations for Trainers to “rediscover themselves” were, for better or worse, the story of the past few days.

Instead, I’m going to touch upon an element of PoGO which has long since (by today’s time standards anyway) been established, but it’s still a sore spot for me and a finger in the eye of free-to-play and rural players: the elimination of Classic leagues, particularly Master League Classic. The move to remove Classic modes from GO Battle League—leagues that don’t allow the use of Pokémon powered up with XL Candies—came in early 2023 following Niantic’s adoption of the XL Candy system. For the uninitiated, XL Candies are how you power up Pokémon from Level 40 to Level 50 (or Level 51 if you’ve reached Best Buddy status with that Pokémon and it is actively your Buddy). To fully max out a Pokémon, you need 296 XL Candies. If the Pokémon is a Shadow Pokémon, which gets a damage boost at the expense of taking more damage in proportion, that number grows even higher.

If this sounds like a lot, well, it is. Accumulating XL Candies is, seemingly by nature, a grind. The primary means of garnering XL Candies for a Pokémon species or evolutionary line is by catching it, whereby you may or may not get one or more XL Candies as a reward. You can also convert regular Candies to XL Candies, though, because the main source of regular Candies is catching Pokémon, all this means is catching more Pokémon. The other options? You might try to walk a specified distance with a Pokémon as your Buddy to get an XL Candy as a bonus, which, as with catching, is no guarantee. Your last bastion of hope is Rare Candies XL.

Whatever the source of these XL Candies, it will take time and effort to accrue them. On top of these very real costs which benefit those who have the privilege to afford them, each wellspring of XL Candies comes with its own pitfalls. As alluded to earlier and covered in at least one previous post on this blog, each Pokémon species or evolutionary line has its own exclusive Candy used to power it up. Charmander Candies can’t be used to power up Squirtle and vice versa. Regarding the conversion rate from Candies to XL Candies, it’s 100 to one. In other words, starting from zero, you would need 29,600 Candies to be able to power up a Pokémon to Level 50 via conversion—and that doesn’t cover the initial Candy cost of powering up a Pokémon to Level 40 or adding a second move for use in PvP (player vs. player). Walking? Depending on the species/line, it could take anywhere from one kilometer to 20 km. to earn a regular Candy and the chance at an XL Candy, the prospects of which may be improved by the use of an item called a Poffin offered—you guessed it—in Pokémon GO’s in-game Shop. And Rare Candies XL? The issue is in the very name. They’re rare, even more so than Rare Candies.

All of this to satisfy a quantity of XL Candies which is, as far as I can tell, completely arbitrary. PoGO’s XL Candies economy is a broken one the likes of which would be even more glaring if not for how stupidly broken our own real-world global economy is for the vast majority of people. It’s particularly galling when considering that Stardust, likewise built up by catching Pokémon, is also used to power up Pokémon and that earning PokéCoins is its own grind which can’t be satisfied by any of the same mechanisms as XL Candies. (These PokéCoins have a daily limit, too—that is, unless you’re a paying customer.) For your run-of-the-mill Pokémon—your Spearows, your Hoppips, your Wurmples, your Bidoofs, your Lillipups, your Yungooses, your Lechonks—getting to 296 is eminently achievable. What good that’ll do you is another story, but it’s certainly doable. There are enough wild spawns to make it possible; in the case of some of these, more than enough (looking at you, Yungoos!).

For Legendary Pokémon, meanwhile, tied to Raids in all but the most unusual of circumstances, the only way you’re getting the requisite XL Candies in a timely manner is paying to complete enough Raids to meet or exceed the threshold. It’s bad enough if you have an active and vibrant local Pokémon GO community which can facilitate the kind of raiding you’ll need to reach the magic number. If you don’t have a local Raid community? You’re relying on an online community and paying a premium for Remote Raid Passes, themselves subject to a daily limit and a higher cost relative to Premium Raid Passes. And Mythical Pokémon other than Meltan? You’ll likely need to shell out for enough Raids to earn enough Rare Candies XL to power them up, as they don’t spawn in the wild and walking to get an XL Candy—a chance at an XL Candy, mind you—is 20 km. a pop. That’s assuming you’re playing legitimately, and in a game in which the use of multiple accounts, “spoofing” to place your position in-game somewhere you physically are not, and the manipulation of devices to falsify and inflate your distance walked are common practices, that is quite the assumption to make. And in some ways, it’s actually easier to generate XL Candies and Rare Candies XL for Legendaries and Mythicals than it was at the inception of the XL Candy system. That’s right—it used to be worse.

This is all, in a word, grotesque. Shortly after Niantic’s announcement that it was doing away with Classic leagues, a move that felt premature at best to onlookers, the forecast was one of doom and gloom. Ben Sledge, features editor at TheGamer with an emphasis on the esports industry, painted this shift back in January 2023 as “a death knell for PvP.” Sledge, highlighting the notion that PoGO’s battle modes are already buggy enough to make them borderline unplayable at times, found that putting the kibosh on Classic formats creates a clear disadvantage for the players who can’t afford or simply don’t wish to pay to compete with fully maxed-out Pokémon. In Great League or Ultra League, not having XL Candies for Legendaries generally isn’t a concern, though the accessibility of certain non-Legendary Pokémon by which to amass XL Candies remains a topic of discussion.

In Master League, however, which does not place a limit on the upper bounds of a Pokémon’s Combat Power (CP), Legendary and Mythical Pokémon are, if not necessary, highly advisable. Of the top 10 Pokémon species on PvPoke’s Master League rankings, nine of them are either Legendary or Mythical Pokémon, with the sole exception, Dragonite, being considered by many to be a “pseudo-Legendary.” Expanding to the top 25 increases the number to seven non-Legendaries, but that’s still a minority, not to mention a few of these (Goodra and Baxcalibur, chief among them) have not seen frequent enough spawns to be practical choices for most participants. This is to say that while competing without Legendary/Mythical Pokémon is possible, it is a significant ask of the player, not to mention, regardless of viability, it is severely limiting. Even for the most skilled battlers, the superior products of these Legendary and Mythical Pokémon’s base statistics can’t be argued with. Quite literally, it’s a numbers game and it favors the Trainers who use Legendaries and Mythicals.

Sledge’s article’s tagline reads that the elimination of Classic leagues presents “another barrier of entry to would-be battlers.” Over a year later, that reality hasn’t changed, and if anything, it’s gotten worse. If open Master League isn’t expressly pay-to-win, it’s increasingly becoming a pay-to-play format. For a game that bills itself as “free to play,” that’s a tough pill to swallow.

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Dragonite looks sad that it doesn’t have any other non-Legendary Pokémon to play with.

Within the Pokémon GO battle community, there is a lot of waffling about which league is best: open Great League, open Ultra League, or open Master League. For some players, it likely comes down to their performance in each format, with the “best” league being that in which they win the most. For others, it’s Great League by virtue of it being the most accessible. I would suspect that, on the Venn diagram of Trainers who excel (or at least do the least worst) in Great League and those battlers who find OGL least objectionable for its breadth of options, there is a considerable amount of overlap. Generally speaking, you’re not going to sign up for a mode of play in which you can’t compete—unless you’re desperate for a change or you’re truly playing with no expectation of doing well. It’s all just a game at the end of the day, but you still don’t want to lose if you can help it.

As YouTube content creator Jonkus observed in one of his videos, though, Master League is perhaps the fairest format, and it boils down to a simple reason: rather than relying on a CP limit, as is the case with Great League (1500 CP max) and Ultra League (2500 CP max), in OML, all Pokémon are the same level. This is a big reason why I find Master League being gatekept by personal finances or people’s moral scruples disheartening. In theory, herein you have a consistent meta, even if there is a glut of Legendary and Mythical Pokémon at the top. The likes of Dialga, Kyogre, and Mewtwo have been relevant seemingly for ages, even if they aren’t necessarily top-tier options anymore. An investment in one or all of these Pokémon has likely been worth it.

It is quite an investment, though, and one that has gotten all the steeper. I said that, in theory, everyone is on an equal playing field, but especially at the lower ranks/ratings, I’m sure there are people venturing into open Master League with Level 40 Pokémon, probably not even double-moved, at that. One of my locals recently texted me that he went 22–3 on a particular day in GBL using a fully maxed Origin Forme Palkia, a fully maxed Origin Forme Dialga, and a fully maxed Tapu Bulu. Of course you did, my dude. It wasn’t a fair fight.

Speaking personally, I have sworn off Master League, and it honestly hurts on an emotional level to be cut off from an entire mode of play because I don’t spend money on PoGO. The Pokémon I built specifically for use in the past are now relegated to use in Raids or for mop-up duty in Team Rocket encounters. Landorus, “Guardian of the Fields,” reduced to fighting the occasional Shadow Lileep. An ignominious distinction, to be sure, and largely a waste. My pain is such that it makes watching any content on Twitch or YouTube involving OML something I usually avoid—and then I feel even worse because I’m not supporting those content creators. It, in a word, sucks.

I’m not the only one who has taken this position either. Master League is commonly derided as “Whale League,” a nod to the use of the term “whale” by people in the mobile gaming industry to pejoratively refer to players like my aforementioned local who spend large sums on the in-app purchases in ostensibly F2P games. That sucks, too, that there should be any sense of resentment or division within the Pokémon GO community over this issue. Players like me shouldn’t feel resigned to playing an inferior limited meta format (cough, Jungle Cup, cough) because they don’t want to feed the game’s manipulative economy.

The death of Master League Classic had one benefit: it meant that battlers no longer had to fret about building versions of Pokémon for both Master League and Master League Classic. But it wasn’t worth the newfound exclusionary status of perhaps the most consistent format in GO Battle League, and the occasional inclusion of Master League Premier in the season doesn’t make up for it. Barring a major fix to the XL Candy system, an unlikely bit of happenstance, this blight on an already checkered mode of play in GBL will persist. Amid Niantic’s other PR struggles, it’s a decidedly bad look.