Niantic's May Community Day calendar is locked in, and after a string of legacy-Pokemon spotlights, the company is leaning into one of Paldea's strangest fan-favorites: Lechonk, the Hog Pokemon, gets its first Community Day on Saturday, May 9, from 2pm to 5pm local time.
It's the kind of pick that delights one half of the player base and confuses the other. Lechonk is a near-meme Pokemon — a chubby, vaguely embarrassed pig that became one of Scarlet and Violet's breakout characters precisely because the entire pitch is "a normal pig that knows it's a Pokemon now." That makes the Community Day shiny chase oddly compelling, since the shiny variant is golden and looks exactly like a roast you should not eat.
The exclusive move: Mud-Slap Oinkologne
The featured reward for evolving Lechonk during the event window — or up to four hours after it ends — is an Oinkologne with the Fast Attack Mud-Slap. That's a meaningful pull. Mud-Slap on a Normal-type Oinkologne isn't going to break the meta, but in Great League and Ultra League it gives Oinkologne a Ground-type chip-damage option it has never had access to natively, and against the current Steel- and Rock-heavy ladder it's a genuine functional upgrade rather than just a collector trophy.
For the PvP-curious, both the male (gray) and female (pink) Oinkologne forms get the move, and there is no functional difference between them in battle — the difference is purely cosmetic. If you only manage one trophy evolution before the four-hour grace window expires, pick whichever sprite you like more.
Bonus stack — and why it's better than it looks
The headline numbers from the bonus stack:
- 3-hour Incense duration (vs. the standard 1 hour)
- 1-hour Lure Module duration (vs. 30 minutes)
- 2x Catch Candy
- 2x chance at Candy XL for trainers level 31 and up
- 1/4 Egg Hatch Distance for any egg placed in an Incubator during the event window
- Increased Shiny rate on Lechonk encounters (community-tracked at roughly 1 in 20 — about 5%)
The 1/4 Egg Hatch Distance bonus is the one that quietly carries the day for most lapsed players. If you've got 2km eggs sitting in incubators, those drop to 500m for the three-hour window — meaning a single 30-minute walking session can clear out a stack that would have taken you days otherwise. Combined with the 3-hour Incense (which works even from your couch, if you're willing to pop a few tap-spawns), this is one of the most generous Community Day bonus profiles Niantic has run in the past year.
The paid Special Research
For US$1.99 (or local equivalent), the Lechonk Community Day Special Research ticket grants three guaranteed Lechonk encounters with the event-exclusive Special Background — basically a small grass-and-rocks photo backdrop that marks the Pokemon as event-caught — plus the usual handful of items. It's not a must-buy, but the Special Background catches are the only Pokemon from the event that can be reliably shown as Community-Day-stamped in your collection a year from now, which matters to the Pokemon-as-trading-cards crowd more than it does to the battle crowd.
Why Lechonk now?
Niantic's Community Day cadence has been the subject of some debate lately — long-time players have noticed the slot has increasingly gone to Pokemon with relatively low PvP impact, and Lechonk fits that pattern. The likeliest read is that the company is balancing two pressures: keeping the casual base engaged with charismatic, easy-to-recognize picks (Lechonk fans are very much a thing online), while saving the bigger meta-shaping picks for the paid Community Day Classic slot, which lands the following week with Deino on May 16.
The other May date you should put in your calendar
That second May Community Day, the Classic slot, is where the heavy hitter shows up: Deino, the Brutal Swing line, and the long-anticipated Hydreigon spotlight. May 16, same 2-5pm local window. Brutal Swing on Hydreigon is a genuine PvP-relevant unlock — it's what a lot of players have been waiting for since the original Deino Community Day in 2022 — and the extended Lure Module bonus this time means you can keep encountering Deino at lured PokeStops for an additional four hours after the headline window closes, all the way through 9pm local time.
If you're choosing where to spend the bigger chunk of your time across the two events, the math is fairly clean: Lechonk is the better casual session, Deino is the better long-term battle investment. The good news is that both are scheduled far enough apart that you can do one event hard, take the week to recover, and roll into the second.
Quick checklist for May 9
- Stack a few Star Pieces and Lucky Eggs the night before — the catch XP from a 3-hour incense session is significant.
- Empty your incubators of any 5km or 7km eggs you don't care about and load up 2km eggs to abuse the 1/4 hatch bonus.
- Save your Pinap and Silver Pinap berries for the shiny encounters — Mud-Slap Oinkologne wants high candy throughput.
- Plan your evolution window: you have until 9pm local time to lock in Mud-Slap, even though the catch event ends at 5pm.
- If you're going to buy the Special Research ticket, do it before 5pm — purchases stop accepting new starts at the event close.
Niantic's May 2026 calendar isn't its flashiest in recent memory, but the bonus structure is one of the most player-friendly stacks the studio has rolled out in a while. For lapsed trainers especially, this is a low-effort weekend to come back, hatch a stack of eggs, and pick up a competitively useful Oinkologne in the process.
