An Objective Ranking of Shiny Pokémon

and take the average of these values among all non-transparent pixels. We carried out this computation for every generation one through four Pokemon in each of its different forms, giving each a theoretical score between 0 and 443.4, with higher scores indicating that the shiny and non-shiny forms are very different. In reality, scores ranged only from 7.3 to 182.6, with an average score of 55.4. Here are the full results:

Ranking of all generation 1-4 shiny Pokemon

Disclaimer: This methodology is quite tough on Pokemon with certain features, such as translucent wings, that don’t vary much or at all in color between the standard and shiny forms. Butterfree is a damn fine shiny, but receives a miserable score of 15.7 because its wings account for such a large portion of its sprite. Sorry, Butterfree. We’ll make it up to you later.

In addition, there are subtle differences between some of the male and female forms, but with the exceptions of Hippopotas and Hippowdon, the color palettes are similar enough that the scores between male and female forms are quite close to each other. Unless noted otherwise, scores are for male versions (just because it was easier to code it this way).

Finally, we had to discard Gastly from the rankings, for the simple fact that its sprite isn’t in the same relative location in the two corresponding image files. But you don’t need our rankings to tell you that shiny Gastly is pretty great, and as you’ll see, much better than the rest of its line.

#5: Alolan Graveler (Score 142.6): Shiny Kantonian and Alolan Geodude and Graveler are some of the coolest shinies in the game. This one ranks highest out of the family, with Alolan Geodude not too far behind. There’s probably a joke about polishing a turd in here somewhere.

#4: Politoed (Score 144.7): The cotton candy shiny! By far the coolest of the otherwise underwhelming Poliwag family, the contrast between the light green-and-yellow and the blue-and-pink makes it the best item evolution shiny in the game.

#3: Heracross (Score 146.2): Pink Heracross is the highest ranking generation I-IV shiny yet to be released in Pokemon GO, and also the highest of all regional Pokemon in these generations. Maybe we’ll see it for the ultra bonus unlock in 2020.

#2: Espeon (Score 147.0): This one might be a bit controversial. While there are many people who don’t love shiny Espeon (or green shinies in general), there’s one thing that can’t be argued: it sure is different from the standard form.

#1: Azumarill (Score 182.8): It’s not even close, folks. Blowing everything else out of the water by a whopping 35 points, yellow Azumarill is the king of all shinies. The whole family is fantastic, and makes the thought of hatching another Azurill that much less painful. Plus, shinies do more damage.

#7: Wingull (Score 10.0): What happens when you take a mostly neutral-colored shiny and change blue stripes to green? Pretty much nothing.

#4: Claydol (Score 9.4): This one might be a bit unfair, but Claydol receives an extremely low score because the only thing that changes in the shiny variant is the color of its eyes. At least if we get this shiny family, it might soften the blow of having another Baltoy nest in town a bit.

#3: Typhlosion (Score 8.7): Another shiny that’s nearly identical to its normal form, at least when it’s standing up. If the picture of the sprite had captured a different angle, Typhlosion probably wouldn’t have made the list.

#2, #5, and #6: Wormadam (Plant 9.7, Trash 9.4, Sandy 8.4): These ones are straight up awful, and I defy anyone to say otherwise. Shiny Mothim is cool, but the rest of the family looks essentially the same in their shiny and regular forms.

#1: Haunter (Score 7.3): We all know how bad shiny Gengar is (its score of 14.9 puts it at the 20th worst) but shiny Haunter is even worse, differing only in the color of its tongue. If I had three shiny Gastly, I’d be tempted to transfer two of them.

If you’re unhappy with the above approach, we also decided to try a different criterion. Instead of considering the entire sprite in our analysis, we could also consider only some of the pixels -- the ones that are most different between the shiny and nonshiny forms. This way, Pokemon that are mostly similar but have some interesting accents, like Butterfree, Wingull, and Umbreon, receive a better ranking due to the larger differences on a small portion of their sprites. In the following rankings, we considered the 2% of pixels that differ the most; we call these the accent pixels. The average distance between accent pixels is 131.8, and Pokemon scores ranged between 35.5 and 355.4.

#4: Yanma (Score 282.7): Shiny Yanma features a blue accent in the areas where its standard form is red. Looking forward to the worldwide release of this one soon!

#3: Azumarill (Score 289.2): Turns out Azumarill is still great by this metric, which makes sense since it ignores the white dots that look the same on both forms. Not the best this time, though.

#2: Mothim (Score 324.7): As we saw with Yanma, blue accents instead of red makes for a great score by this metric. Mothim redeems its family and ranks as the highest unreleased shiny from the first four generations. When that day comes, hopefully you’ll find a male one.

#5 and #1: Rapidash (279.8) and Ponyta (355.4): Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how awesome these two are. The flames are the story here. Both Rapidash and Ponyta have the same body color in their shiny and normal forms, but their manes are about as different as any features on any Pokemon in the game. Ponyta’s richer blue gives it the edge over Rapidash and makes it the best shiny by this metric.

#5: Persian (Score 51.7): Don’t like the sickly green glow about shiny Persian? Neither do we.

#4: Garchomp (Score 51.2): When Garchomp inevitably gets its community day, lots of people are going to be sorely disappointed. Gible and Gabite are decent, but we’ll be focusing on the candy, not the shinies for this CD.

#3: Igglybuff (Score 50.4): At least shiny Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff have green eyes. Igglybuff has nothing going for it.

#2: Gengar (Score 43.5): We expected this one, right? Whie Gengar is slightly differently-colored all over, saving it from a position on this list under the first metric, it doesn’t have any standout highlights, making it the second worst shiny by this one.

#1: Blissey (Score 35.5): One day, gyms all over town will be anchored by shiny Blissey. And we won’t even know the difference.

Conclusion

One pattern we observed when compiling these rankings is that many of the best shinies tend to be from the Johto region. This turns out to be true on average by either metric, while shinies from the Sinnoh region are least different.

Ultimately, shiny preference is a subjective matter, and your criteria may be different from these, but it’s interesting to see some of our common picks for favorite and (especially) least favorite shinies justified by the math. You can find the full list here.

With more Pokemon from the Unova region on the way, we’ll be sure to update these rankings  when the bulk of the new generation is released. It certainly looks like we’ll have some more great shiny forms to collect quite soon. Happy hunting!