Update: Tested this as a house rule in actual play.

Findings:

This works really well but we need to figure out how many of these cards should go into the item deck. Currently there is only one rare candy but by the logic of making evolution more prominent, there should be at least as many as there are players. Or perhaps even 1.5 per player. So 2 players = 3 pokefinders, 5 players = 8, etc. (rounding up)

The workaround is just to create a master deck with every pokemon in it and load it in as a saved object. That way we have somewhere we can search if we need to use this item. This worked well but the search feature was understandably slow to load. It would be interesting to be able to have it load just the cards in play instead but I don't have the scripting know-how to make that happen at the start of the game.

The house rule as it stands is that another player places the desired evolution revealed on the board. The consideration here is who gets to make the decision? Since the evolution is such an advantage it goes without saying that the decision should be someone that is "losing." I.E the person with the weakest pokemon. This is part of some item cards and events already so it fit nicely into the ruleset.

Going forward:

I'm a graphic designer by trade so I think I may make a custom card when I havbe some free time for this to test out. It would also be interesting to load in a 3d object of a pokedex to search through when using this card instead of having a giant deck on the table. There could even be some interactive functionality to it so you don't need to use the search function but again making something like that work is outside my wheelhouse.

I hope at least someone found this interesting and I will update as I dive deeper into it.

(Sorry it took me a while to see your post, wasn't checking notifications - thanks for the comment!)

So, yeah, evolving in this game is not really a lot like in the videogames, so it ends up being something that forces people to try to trade or just rely on luck to achieve 3, maybe 4 fully evolved powerful families before the Pokémon League.

I tried to remedy that by adding some stuff like more Trade Events, some Events like Kimono Sisters and Items like Rare Candies.

I remember testing some XP system a while ago - to at least have some sense of "evolving" a Pokémon you use a lot, or that is with you since early in the game. But I couldn't get it to work (also made the game a little longer, with more battles - and a lot of the times I feel like the game is already waaay too long).

Anyway - evolutions have always been something on my mind, specially because of the aspects you brought up. I thought of adding more ways of getting it through Events or maybe add another Rare Candy or two, but idk, the balancing on that is a little hard to achieve. How well were the tests with your Item idea? Would love to hear them!