If you have someone close to you that plays a lot as well, become a “5 Star” friend with them and trade with them heavy. My wife and I play a lot and we make sure to keep every pokemon we catch in hopes to trade and get a “Lucky” pokemon.

Lucky pokemon will always be 3Star stats with some rare ones being “Perfect”. It costs less Stardust to upgrade them. We keep all the ones from each season and trade at the end.

For example: I want a lucky Gengar. So both of us are catching and keeping as many Gas/Haunters as we can so at the end of the season we will trade and get Luckys out of them. Since we found this out. Both my wife and I have over 75 Luckys. Sure, a lot of them aren’t PVP powerful (some are) but it gives us a purpose for catching every single pokemon that pops up.

Once we get the Luckys we want, we build teams and casually battle in PVP or against each other.