Can You Transfer Pokemon to Sword and Shield Using Pokemon Bank?

Pokemon Sword and Shield‘s Pokedex doesn’t include all the Pokemon ever created, which you probably know unless you’ve been able to ignore the furor surrounding that particular design choice. That means what you see in the Galar Pokedex — all 400 Pokemon — is almost all you get.

Previous Pokemon games would let you transfer other ‘mon in using Pokemon Bank, a storage platform that lets you keep far more Pokemon than you could hope to store in the PC Boxes. This would be a way to transfer, say, your favorite Psyduck from Pokemon HeartGold to Pokemon Ultra Moon. It even applied to a Pokemon not found natively in that game’s region.

However, Pokemon Bank isn’t compatible with Sword and Shield. Its replacement app, Pokemon Home, will take on that role, connecting the Switch Pokemon games to Pokemon GO and the 3DS Pokemon games — X, Y, Omega Ruby, Alpha Sapphire, Sun, Moon, Ultra Sun, and Ultra Moon.

The trouble is that Pokemon Home won’t release until early 2020, so if you’re itching to import your legendaries from previous Gens, you’ll just have to wait.

Pokemon Sword and Shield are a bit different. Because there’s no real National Pokedex featuring pokemon from other regions, what you can transfer using Bank is fairly limited. However, you can still transfer some Pokemon to Sword and Shield using Pokemon Bank.

Pokemon You Can Transfer to SwSh using Home

Alongside Bulbasaur, Here’s the list of all Pokemon you’ll be able to transfer to Sword and Shield once Pokemon Home releases on Nintendo Switch.

Will More Pokemon be Added to the SwSh Dex?

The answer is more than likely not. Game Freak has said on multiple occasions it has no plans to add more Pokemon to the Galar Dex and will, instead, provide ways to interact with your older Pokemon in Pokemon Home.

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It’s a bit of bad news if you’re wanting to transfer lots of older ‘mon to the latest Pokemon games, but check out our other Pokemon Sword and Shield guides to help you get the most out of the ‘mon you’ll find in Galar anyway.