Building a Living Pokedex

[Guybrush20X6]

First, the explanations for those unaware

A living Pokedex is every single Pokemon arranged in boxes, to imitate a Pokedex. While a normal Pokedex only require having the Pokemon once, a living Pokedex requires all of them at hand, including legendaries, pre-evolutions and all branching paths. Prior to Gen 6 this was little more than bragging rights but with Pokemon Bank it's now a way to make sure you don't have to start over from scratch each time, plus the more Pokemon you have in bank the more free battle points you get.

I've been working on one for a while. The hardest parts so far have been farming for Moon Stones in ORAS, getting all the misc trade evolution items with Battle Points and each and every gen 5 Pokemon with their stupid high evolution levels. I'm still about 200 short and I need a Xernious but have no way to get one.

Anyone else doing this?

 

[Firus]

I've got a Living Dex in my Y version. The wide variety of available Pokemon made it much easier to complete the Dex and I enjoyed playing the game enough that I wanted to extend my playthrough as much as possible, so I figured why not. I started one back in Diamond but never got around to finishing it, because by the time I started actively working toward it I'd already finished the Dex and it was harder to motivate myself to go back and do all of that breeding.

Technically I'm still missing Shaymin (one of my favorite Pokemon, ironically and unfortunately enough) because the hack checks on the Poke Transporter didn't like mine caught in Diamond/Pearl (okay, so I hacked in Oak's Letter, but I legitimately caught them and didn't modify their stats or anything) and I haven't gotten around to dealing with trying to get a "legit" one yet. I guess I'm also missing Diancie since I've screwed up and missed both events now. But technically, since it functions for achieving Dex completion by the game's standards and I have a hard time feeling bad about a lack of completion due to the annoying means by which you have to obtain event Pokemon, I consider it complete.

It's certainly kind of a pain to do but it's also one I found very fun and rewarding. I probably wouldn't like to attempt it in any gen before sixth, though.

 

[Sir Gengar de Èctoplasma]

I've never had a living Pokedex, but I tried to do something similar in my Diamond version: having all fully-evolved Pokemon (though I had some pre-evos in place of fully-evolved ones, like Seadra instead of Kingdra, as I didn't have a Dragon Scale).

I had almost every fully-evolved non-legendary Pokemon, with the exception of Kanto and Johto starters, Empoleon, a few Pokemon that evolved by trading with items or by happiness (I had their pre-evos instead), Lunatone (I didn't know about GTS then, nor I didn't manage to get one in HG) and few others.

I've dropped that "ambition" after the release of Gen V and VI games, I just didn't have the motivation anymore after playing the newer games.