‘Pokemon Go’ is available now for iOS and Android devices. (Nintendo)
Capturing gyms is an important part of Pokemon Go, but holding them for a significant amount of time can be quite challenging. What are some of the strategies for hanging onto a frequently-contested gym?
In general, the idea behind Pokemon Go gyms is to keep the prestige level as high as possible. By training in a friendly gym (i.e. a gym held by your team), you raise the prestige, but when an enemy fights in your gym, they lower the prestige. When the enemy drains your gym’s prestige all the way down, they can now swoop in and claim it. For that reason, it’s equally important to capture enemy gyms as it is to train in your own, raising the prestige level high to counteract enemies lowering it.
Outside of just bragging rights and wanting to claim all the key areas of your city, holding onto gyms is also important because it gives you a daily coin bonus.
So beyond just constantly getting out there and training, are there any strategies for maintaining control over your gym? Well, a Reddit user named HeineBOB has put together a pretty brilliant new method of defending these gyms that are often shifting back and forth between teams. This particular strategy requires Magikarp, Magnemite, and a few teammates willing to help you out with your master plan.
Here’s how HeineBOB explains the 10 step strategy:
1: Take down enemy highly visible, extremely contested gym.
2: Put in 3 magikarps.
3: Start training: A single magnenite can kill 3 magikarps, giving you 3k prestige every battle(+300exp).
4: When gyms goes up in level, either put in more magikarps, or a backstopper to prevent attackers from getting easy -1500 prestige bonus
5: In 5 minutes, 3 people can EASILY boost gym from 6k to 50k.
6: (This is where the fun/trolling begins) Enemies attack. But because they are forced into group battles, and asynchronous battle don’t lessen prestige, and because each magikarp defeated only gives -500 prestige, they take down the gym very slowly.
7: As soon as the gym drops in prestige, you can train it up about 3-5 times faster than they can take it down.
8: Watch their faces as they realize their 3000cp dragonites cannot beat a 3-10 magikarp gym even given infinite time, or teammates.
9: Sit with a wide grin on your face as you become legendary in your city.
10: Post your success/experience here on reddit
To do this does require a fair amount of teamwork, however, and members of your team who aren’t aware of this strategy might come in and inadvertently screw things up. You also need to get a few players to help out, and it requires you to constantly stay on top of the gym. But it’s certainly a good way to rack up a lot of XP and/or annoy all the members of the enemy team in your city or town.
This also means you must actually be able to find a Magnemite, which can be a somewhat rare Pokemon depending on where you live. There are some Magnemite nests here and there, though; for more information, check out our guide to finding Pokemon nests near you. And if you can’t find a Magnemite, the principle of the trick still applies if you want to try it out with some similarly-leveled species.