How to hunt Shiny Zygarde in Pokemon Sword and Shield

Playing Pokemon Sword and Shield in 2024 might sound sort of strange, but there’s actually a really good reason for it. Pokemon Legends: Z-A was recently announced for release in 2025, and it’s almost certainly going to include Zygarde in some capacity. To “prepare” for the release of the new game, some Pokemon trainers are heading back to Sword and Shield to Shiny hunt Zygarde.

Outside of events, Pokemon Sword and Shield is the only game in which you can legitimately hunt for a Shiny Zygarde. More specifically, you can only go after one in the Crown Tundra’s DLC Max Lair. This is kind of a brutal Shiny hunt, but we’ve come prepared with tips and tricks on beating Dynamax Zygarde every time. 

Shiny Zygarde information

As mentioned before, the only way to catch Shiny Zygarde is via Dynamax Adventures in Pokemon Sword and Shield. Luckily, these are very easy to access. Once you get to the Wild Area for the first time, you can return to Wedgehurst Station and head to the Crown Tundra even with zero Gym Badges. From there, you can lose to Peony and enter the Max Lair to start doing Dynamax Adventures. Without the Shiny Charm, however, your odds of receiving a Shiny Pokemon from a successful Dynamax Adventure is roughly 1 in 75. With the Shiny Charm, your odds of receiving a Shiny Pokemon after a successful Dynamax Adventure is 1 in 25. Even with the Shiny Charm, your odds actually aren’t that great. Zygarde is a tough opponent, so even with a great squad you won’t always win against it. Add that to the fact that each Dynamax Adventure takes about 20 minutes each and you’ve got a particularly difficult Shiny hunt on your hands.

Once you’ve located Zygarde in the Max Lair, it’s time to begin your quest for a Shiny Zygarde. We’d recommend teaming up with at least one other human player – the fewer CPUs present in battle, the better. They’ll often make suboptimal decisions that cost you the run. When it comes to selecting Pokemon, you need two specific kinds on your team: a special Ice-type Pokemon and a Pokemon who knows Wide Guard. The absolute best Ice-type Pokemon for this run is Jynx. It’s strong, fast, and can deal huge damage to Zygarde with Ice Beam. It can also put it to sleep with Lovely Kiss to prevent it from attacking for a while. Honorable mentions for this role are Vanillish, and Cryogonal. If you see any of these Pokemon, make sure you pick them up. Wide Guard is necessary because Zygarde often uses moves like Land’s Wrath, which can very quickly and easily wipe out a team otherwise. The best Wide Guard users are Pelipper, Hitmonlee, Mienshao, and Kingler. Ideally, you’d bring one of the Ice-types we mentioned plus one of those Wide Guard users – and if you do, you’ll be all set to defeat Zygarde easily.

More Dynamax Adventure tips

To sum things up, here’s your best strategy for Shiny Zygarde: find another player who wants to hunt it too, and then try to position yourself so that you have the Ice-type Pokemon and the other player has the Wide Guard user (or vice versa). Spam Ice-type attacks and use Wide Guard on every single turn. There’s one problem, though: in Dynamax Adventures, Zygarde has the Power Construct Ability. When its HP reaches half, it transforms into its Complete form and regains a bunch of HP – a sort of “phase two” to the fight. When this happens, your strategy should remain the same. As a reminder, when you and another human player successfully defeat Zygarde, both of your Shiny chances are rolled separately. With the Shiny Charm, each player has their own individual 1 in 100 chance for the Zygarde they caught to be Shiny. A Premier Ball matches it really well.

Let’s say you find a perfect Dynamax Adventure route that includes a great Ice-type and a great Wide Guard user. Zygarde is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to win against without at least one of these Pokemon. Therefore, if you’re on a good route and capture Zygarde and it’s not Shiny, it’s a good idea to soft reset on the ending screen so you can keep the route and host it again. When you do, it’ll have the exact same Pokemon as before. The only problem is that the game will start charging you Dynite Ore every time you re-host the route (because you quit midway through), so make sure you have lots of Dynite Ore saved up before you do this. Repeating a good route can get you a Shiny Zygarde much faster.

And like we mentioned earlier, the 1 in 100 odds to receive a Shiny Zygarde aren’t quite as appealing as they sound. Each Dynamax Adventure takes about 20 minutes, and they can take even longer with human allies since you can’t turn off battle animations. Still, it’s worth the time loss to team up with other players since it makes you more likely to defeat Zygarde. It’s important to note that there are four other Pokemon who can only be found Shiny in Dynamax Adventures: Tapu Koko, Tapu Lele, Tapu Bulu, and Tapu Fini. Interestingly enough, all of the Pokemon who can only be caught Shiny in Dynamax Adventures are not present in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet in any capacity – a somewhat disappointing coincidence. Still, if you do decide to go for the Shiny Zygarde, we wish you the best of luck!

If you’re looking for more Pokemon guides to read, we still have plenty of them available for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet plus its DLCs. Pokemon Sword and Shield and its DLCs are available now on Switch and you can visit the official site here.