Pokémon TCG Worlds Review
By: Corey Rausch
Source: Play! Pokemon
And just like that, another competitive Pokémon season has come to an end. The 2025 Pokémon World Championship took place last weekend, capping a season that broke records and featured plenty of fun formats. From all across the world, 721 Masters division players were whittled down to 32, then an asymmetrical top cut of 11, finishing with two players clashing in the stadium on championship Sunday. Today, I want to go over the top storylines and trends from the weekend to celebrate the history that was made and then to look ahead to the upcoming season!
The Data
As anyone who taps into my podcast Ancient Wisdom knows, the numbers are always something we like to check out. The top six played decks of Day 1 were:
Gholdengo ex (22.9%)
Dragapult ex/Dusknoir (17.2%)
Gardevoir ex (13%)
Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex (10.1%)
Marnie’s Grimmsnarl ex (4.9%)
Flareon ex/Noctowl (4.4%)
Some of this is inflated because with a smaller, highly competitive tournament, of course the best decks are going to be played more. But with the top 3 decks taking up more than 50% of the room, this is a pretty centralized metagame.
Gholdengo ex was the biggest winner coming out of the latest Black Bolt/White Flare expansion, gaining access to Air Balloon and Genesect ex. Air Balloon allows the player to retreat their Gholdengo ex for free, potentially locking in two full value Coin Bonuses in a single turn while Genesect ex’s Metallic Signal Ability allows the user to search for two Metal evolution Pokémon every turn. This kind of consistency boost skyrocketed the erstwhile maker of rain up the competitive charts.
Dragapult ex and Gardevoir ex, on the other hand, did not get much of anything from the additional set of cards added to pool following the North American International Championship (NAIC) in June. Sure, some Gardevoir variants added in Frillish and Jellicent ex, but that was a minority. These two decks have been the standard bearers of the Standard Format since rotation earlier this year. They have been competitive mainstays since they were released and the 2025 World Championship was no different.
From here, Day Two shifted slightly after eight rounds of high level play. The top six plays shifted to:
Gholdengo ex (29.9%)
Dragapult ex/Dusknoir (16.5%)
Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex (12.6%)
Gardevoir ex (9.4%)
Charizard ex/Pidgeot ex (4.7%)
Dragapult ex/Munkidori (4.7%)
If the boosts to Gholdengo’s popularity were not clear when the tournament started, finding a way to positively convert from such a substantial play rate in Day One hammered this home. The Golden Surfer is a force to be reckoned with, with players trying a variety of wonky tech choices to try to gain an advantage wherever they could.
Gardevoir, for once, negatively converted, dropping out of the top three. For anyone paying attention since the dawn of the Scarlet Violet era, there seemed to be hope that the Psychic Embrace that had long felt like a chokehold on the format may be loosening. The combined versions of Dragapult ex cleared 20% of the field, and even Raging Bolt ex converted positively, an anomaly for the long-necked behemoth.
The Main Event
Five more rounds brought top cut, which featured three Gholdengo ex, two Charizard ex/Pidgeot ex, two Dragapult ex/Dusknoir, two N’s Zoroark ex, one Raging Bolt ex/Teal Mask Ogerpon ex, and one Gardevoir ex.
The players in top cut brought storylines of their own. Piper Lepine was one of the Gholdengo ex pilots, becoming the first female player to top cut the World Championships since 2009 in the Masters Division. Marco Cifuentes was one of the players to surprise many by bringing N’s Zoroark ex to the top cut, one year after his brother Fernando won the World Championships with a rogue deck. Riley McKay was coming off a second place finish at NAIC, hoping to get one step further two months later.
To the chagrin of many, the Finals would feature neither the new king of the format (Gholdengo ex) nor the rogue wonder (N’s Zoroark ex). Feeling like a repeat of the last six months, the Finals featured a showdown between first year Masters player Justin Newdorf with Dragapult ex/Dusknoir and the aforementioned Riley McKay with Gardevoir ex. Gardevoir ex reigns supreme over the format again, the third straight North American event taken down by this Psychic juggernaut. It is the ninth major win in the Masters division since rotation in April.
Somehow, though, this was not the biggest storyline most diehard TCG fans were keeping an eye on.
For once, this rested in the Senior Division.
The Perfect Season
For me and for many, Gabriel Fernandez was the talk of the circuit. He was pursuing something truly unheard of: The Perfect Season. This is to say, he would have earned the maximum number of points allowable with caps from League Challenges, League Cups, Regional Championships, International Championships, and the World Championship. Over the last 12 months he has four Regionals wins (and an additional seventh place finish) and three International wins. Perhaps more impressively, he accomplished this with four different archetypes (Charizard ex/Pidgeot ex, Terapagos ex/Noctowl, Dragapult ex/Munkidori, Gardevoir ex).
While Fernandez ultimately finished one match shy, he ended the season with a perfect attendance record on championship Sunday. He also was part of the South American contingent that brought the surprising Zoroark ex deck that was one of the sensations of the weekend. In the end, he ran into one of the other fun new additions to the format in Gholdengo ex/Joltik.
Source: The Pokémon Company
It is tough to call this a failure for Fernandez, who won Worlds in this division two seasons ago, finished fourth last season, and has at least two other International wins on his resume. It is an imperfect finish to a near perfect run as he enters Masters Division next season.
The Golden Path Forward
The 2026 season is almost upon us, with the first events in Frankfurt and Monterrey in just under a month. While the prerelease events for the next expansion will be under way, there are still three events left in the same format that the World Championship was played in. So what did the biggest event of the year do to shape the format going forward?
First of all, there will be plenty of the same decks that we have seen for a while. Mike Fouchet put it best on Twitter, noting the entire list of cards released in the last year in the Masters’ Finals: Lillie’s Clefairy ex, Budew, Hilda, and Latias ex – so predicting that Dragapult ex and Gardevoir ex will remain present seems like a good bet.
Gholdengo ex was a known presence coming into the event and converted impressively. What variation of the deck, however, may be a little harder to predict. Scizor, Togekiss, Joltik, Chansey, and more were featured in the deck throughout the weekend. The inherent consistency provided by Coin Bonus drawing so many extra cards every turn and Ciphermaniac’s Codebreaking giving some Iono protection makes the customization for the strategy close to limitless.
Raging Bolt ex and Charizard ex decks represented themselves well over the event and will likely be a strong part of the format going forward. Importantly for many, Crustle flopped at the event, missing out entirely on the second day of competition. Tera Box, Flareon ex/Noctowl, Marnie’s Grimmsnarl ex, Armarouge and Joltik Box all made it to Day Two and will see continued exploration.
I have alluded to it already, but the N’s Zoroark ex deck was my favorite takeaway from the weekend, and has shaken up my personal preparation for the Pittsburgh Regionals in September. I did not pay enough attention to the lists from NAIC, but I genuinely like the removal of N’s Darmanitan. As much as I loved Radiant Greninja pre-rotation, the consistency boost of this variation is appealing. Whether it be using Toedscruel or Cornerstone Ogerpon ex, I am not sure yet. But Zoroark ex has seemingly cemented itself as a part of the format. I look forward to see where it goes from here.
If you liked this and/or are looking for more Bonebox approved Pokémon content, check out my podcast Ancient Wisdom, with my co-host DJ Keener. We discuss the standard Pokémon format while occasionally touching on Pokémon Pocket, other card games, Dune, and more. Starting very soon we will be back to a (mostly) weekly schedule and look forward to providing an entertaining and informative look at the Pokémon Trading Card Game.
1 comment
This article was the final nail in the coffin for me trying out Gholdengo. FINE. I’ll do it!!
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