Since 2004, the Pokémon World Championships have been a place where the best Pokémon players from all over the world have come to see which player is the very best, like no-one ever was. This year, the event took place in the Music City itself: Nashville, Tennessee.
This year, to go with the location, it had a special motif to follow the whole music theme. The stage was decked out like a country music venue with the sides set out like Broadway in Nashville. There were decorations of many musical-themed Pokémon all around the arena; it was truly the greatest stage that has been done at a Pokémon World Championships.
What are the Pokémon World Championships?
Over the past year, players from the world of the Pokémon Video Games and Pokémon Trading Card Games have been competing in competitions around the world hoping to obtain enough points to earn an invite to the World Championships, with the top players in each region getting an invite to skip the first day. The event is a 3-day long tournament, with players who received an invite having to go through a day of Swiss Rounds, where they have to play through 6 or more battles to then be ranked based on performance. Based on that, the players who achieve a certain rating will then move onto Day 2 where there’s a second set of Swiss Rounds before the Top 8 players are put into Top Cut until it’s down to the Top 2 on the finals.
Fighting game Pokkén Tournament does it a different way, with players going on a Double Elimination Bracket where, if they lose, they have more chances of going through the loser’s bracket to return to the eventual finals. Pokkén Tournament ran on Pokkén Tournament DX's foundation and started off with a Last Chance Qualifier on the Friday, where any player who chose to enter had a chance to play through to gain a place on the actual Pokkén Tournament DX Championships on Day 2. From there, the top players who earned a place throughout the year faced off to become World Champion.
Special Merchandise
As with every year, a special Pokémon Center pop-up store was opened at the World Championships. This sold a myriad of official Pokémon Center merchandise but also included a number of unique Nashville-themed items, including a Pikachu plush, playmats, deck boxes, card sleeves, T-Shirts, hoodies and bags.
However, to top that off, all players who earned themselves an invite got a special competitor's bag. This contained various other merchandise and exclusive variations of the merchandise in the store. They got an exclusive accessory pouch, screen cleaner, bag and even 5 guitar picks! Unfortunately, we were not able to get hold of the competitor’s bag this year. Boo.
The Announcements
A Pokémon World Championships would not be the same without special announcements, and this year had plenty. While there was sadly no news for the upcoming core games Pokémon Let’s Go, Pikachu! & Let’s Go, Eevee!, The Pokémon Company didn’t hold back on reveals. It started with the reveal of Tag Team GX cards, a new kind of Pokémon GX card that combines two Pokémon and does a lot of damage, but at the cost of 3 Prize Cards when defeated.
Next up was the forthcoming Pokémon: Detective Pikachu movie. Director Rob Letterman and stars Justice Smith and Kathryn Newton came out onto the stage to show off the logo of the upcoming movie as well as getting some audience participation to do some cheers for Pikachu and Charizard, which will be in the movie upon its release.
Finally, during the Saturday, the ruleset for VGC 2019 was revealed, to a mixed response. When it was announced that the ruleset would be GS Cup on Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon (where players can use 2 Restricted Pokémon such as Mewtwo, Necrozma and Zygarde in their team), there were many audible groans, but for the first time ever this circuit will be separated into three. The first Sun Series will ban all Mega Evolutions and Z-Crystals. The second series, Moon Series, will ban all Mega Evolutions while the final series, Ultra Series, allows everything. This idea was much appreciated by the VGC community and should make the next year very interesting.
What was there to do?
If you weren’t invited, you could come as a spectator and there was even more to do there than last year. Starting off, there was a massive trade corner for players to go to trade whatever they wish. From cards to sleeves and even Regional Pokémon in Pokémon GO, the trade section was always full.
There was also, once again, many side events but unfortunately, they were less varied than last year. There were the standard VGC and TCG pickup events where when 8 people had registered, they’d enter a mini-tournament. For TCG, there was also a sealed event that acts like a pre-release tournament where you go in with no cards and have to make a 40 card deck, and a VGC Multi Battle event. There was also the Nashville Open, a huge competition for players who couldn’t win an invite to Worlds and those who had dropped out after Day 1, which allowed for players to win Championship Points towards next year’s World Championships.
After last year had a display of the Kanto Starters made by Mega Construx, this year continued that and had three large statues of Squirtle, Wartortle and Blastoise to check out, and they were really impressive but the most striking element of the Mega Construx both was a huge diorama of all their Pokémon merchandise. Whoever created must be very talented; the attention to detail was mind-blowing.
This year, there was a lovely small retro corner where several Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles were set up to play the classics such as Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Puzzle League, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Stadium 2 and Pokémon Colosseum. It was fun to go back and play people from around the world at the classic mini-games in Pokémon Stadium, that's for sure.
Finally, there was one more major element at the event: Pokémon Let’s Go, Pikachu! & Let’s Go, Eevee! were playable at the event. The demo was the same as the one at E3 in June and PAX West in August, and featured Viridian Forest. It was a good fun demo and I even managed to get a Shiny Oddish as my first encounter. This was, quite obviously, the biggest thing to do away from the tournament and always had a queue of over an hour to play.
The Matches
Of course, there were world-class matches for all three games that helped determine the winners which you can find on the official YouTube channel. These matches really helped show the best of the best.
Pokkén Tournament DX’s finals were on the Saturday and were amongst the most hyped finals we had ever seen. Once again, many players returned from previous years but this year it was the newer players who came out more triumphant as the old guard dropped out of the bracket early on. In the final, ThankSwalot and Tarutaro battled for glory and it looked like it was going to go to Tarutaro as he took a stunning lead and even reset the bracket after coming up through the Loser’s Bracket, but eventually, Thankswalot managed to turn the tide and became the third Pokkén Tournament World Champion.
The Pokémon Trading Card Game was equally as tense. This was the final competition before the format rotated and so many core cards to decks would no longer be usable. Cards such as N, Puzzle of Time and many others wouldn’t be usable after this competition, so it's truly the final time we’d see these cards. Many of the standard decks could be seen during the finals, such as Buzzwole/Lycanroc and Garbotoxin Garbodor decks, with some matches even being mirror matches. However, the contests were fairly clearcut with one clear winner.
Juniors: Naohito Inoue
Seniors: Magnus Pedersen
Masters: Robin Schulz
The Video Game tournament was where things were definitely unique. Despite constant complaints of the format not being innovative enough, this year the top cut for VGC had the most diverse teams that we had seen. With it being the first year of Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon and the first year of National Pokédex, it had never been more diverse.
The Juniors match was a stunning contest that really showed the raw power of such a classic combo. With the duo of Whimsicott and Terrakion making a return from long ago, Won Lee managed to completely dominate Sota Tamemasa’s team, stopping the strategy in the tracks with the combination of Beat Up Whimsicott and Terrakion’s Z-Move Continental Crush preventing Sota from setting up the Trick Room that his team sorely needed.
The Seniors match was a lot closer, with some more conventional strategies coming to light. With much switching of Landorus and Incineroar, James Evans was able to get off continual Intimidates, lowering the Attack stat of Bram De Jonge’s team, which was unfortunately very physically-focused; this eventually let James Evans take the title for the United States.
The Masters division as equally as competitive with Emilio Forbes of the US facing against Paul Ruiz from Ecuador; once again, these were not the more conventional VGC teams you would see. Emilio was using Mega Gengar and Latias while Paul was using Mega Salamence, Gastrodon and Kartana. Both teams continued the trend in VGC of Intimidate but eventually, Paul managed to come out triumphant and became the first ever World Champion from Latin America.
Juniors: Wonn Lee
Seniors: James Evans
Masters: Paul Ruiz
Until Next Year...
This was the last World Championships with so many staples in the battles and at the end, they announced that the Pokémon World Championships would be returning to Washington D.C., where it was held back in 2014.
The World Championships may be fun to watch from home, but they’re much more fun to attend. You’ll get to meet so many like-minded players who share the same passion you do. The community is always there to help each other out, and have a laugh. Animosity is so rare at the event, which is refreshing in this day and age - especially in light of tragic recent events which have forced many organisers to reassess security and have also harmed the perception of the games industry in the media.
If you manage to make it to Washington D.C.'s World Championships next year, you’re bound to have a lot of fun. They might even restore your battered belief in the power of video games (and their associated pastimes) to bring people together.
Comments 26
Now if only Nintendo and the Pokemon company would actually start punishing cheaters maybe going to VGC would feel awesome. Too many hacked Pokemon for me to ever be comfortable playing a game competitively.
After the tragedy that happened at the EA tournament, we really needed this.
Being involved in the Pokemon community for so many years, I often forget, and do find it surprising how few people outside of the community know just how big and active it really is. People literally come from all over the world for the regional and international and world tournaments. Kids and their families and adults as well. It's not a flawless esport by any means and it's not got the crazy followings that something like Fortnite, Hearthstone, Overwatch or League of Legends has, but it's alive and well.
Though honestly, this year's Master's division final felt like something of a steamroll. In my opinion.
@LordGeovanni Nintendo's system is plenty effective. You cannot bring an impossible Pokemon. Any Pokemon that someone hacks that could not be obtained through normal game play is detected. Long gone are the days when you had to worry about people having Pikachu with 999 in every stat, or Spiritomb with wonder guard making it invincible. If you're bothered that they pushed a button on their PC to get their shiny Charizard and you spent 2 months hatching literally 17 thousand eggs because RNG hates you... I know how you feel. But the best advice I can give you is to get over it. I used to get angry about that sort of thing too, for years! Until I finally realized, they were having fun, and I was sulking and complaining. They were enjoying the game how they wanted to play, and I was upset and not having fun anymore. So now, as long as their Pokemon are 100% obtainable through normal means, I don't care if they spent the time to get it legit, or they hacked it into the game in 10 seconds with some outside device. And Nintendo's system is almost perfect at detecting that. On the rare case something slips through, that's a good way to get banned from any official VGC event for a long time.
And we know for our own satisfaction, that we did everything legit. For them, they don't care about their own, so they certainly don't care about yours being legit. (and some jerks will mock you for not doing the same things as them) So again, I don't say this to be rude, just get over it and play the game how you want to play it. Take satisfaction in how you play the game.
@Heavyarms55
That's not good enough for me. When I go up against somebody that somehow has a fully shiny, battle competitive top tier team that is somehow also in illegal pokeballs I know for a fact that they are cheating. And at this point I believe every single top player has been confirmed to have hacked Pokemon. Until they are actually held accountable there is absolutely no reason for a legit player to play competitively. Those 17000 eggs are a whole lot of work for me to do. And there is no legal way to do it faster. So when I spend so much time doing something the legit way and the person in front of me parades around breaking, effectively, the law I can't help it but be pissed.
Like I said. Until the Pokemon company stops promoting these people and actively punishes them when they are cheating I don't see any point in any legit player playing competitive Pokemon. Wasn't there just a World's Finalist who flipped the bird to their opponent after winning? Pokemon company's response was to delete that part of the video so that nobody knows it happens anymore.
Nice report Joe! I went to a regional a couple years ago and everyone was really friendly and having a great time.
@LordGeovanni I'm in the camp that thinks that a lot of cheaters would stop if the iv system would be removed (or at least make them easy to manipulate like evs).
I like the game, I even tolerate the bike simulator, but playing with rng has never been fun.
@kotag
There already are a lot of ways that they reduced difficulty. The most notable are bottle caps which guarantee every single Pokemon can have maxed stats. The only downside to this is that hackers, wanting to play legit, would be unable to set subpar stats. I'm talking about speed allocated to the exact point you need to get through trick room. Hackers have enjoyed cheating the game for so long they do not want to give up even a little bit. I would say that breeding legitimate Pokemon are now 30 times easier but hacking has gone up in usage. This is not a symptom of hackers nearly doing it to get around RNG. This is a symptom of people deliberately cheating to win and small part cheating just to get away with it.
Nothing details my point here more then a VGC world's player tweeting about getting a pirated version of the new Pokemon game prior to it being officially released and actually tweeting it to tournament officials. The officials told them they were stupid and to not tweet them further. No punishment.
I have a question for people who were actually at the tournament about the merchandise rack. A video during the tournament showed that it's called the "Prize Wall" and each item has a sign with a number on it. Could you win these items like arcade prizes? If so, how did you earn the points to get them?
@NintendoLife I know you guys have no control over the clickbait articles that appear at the bottom of the pages, but there is one called ‘my stepmom’ that keeps popping up that links to a decidedly very adult manga site.
I say this because as a Nintendo site it is inevitable that kids will visit, especially (in this case) an article about the Pokemon world championships. I know you occasionally post some more Otaku stuff for us to cringe at, but full on adult material is a bit much.
@JugOfVoodoo The Prize Wall is where you can exchange points earned at side events for prizes
@RadioHedgeFund can you email a screenshot to us? [email protected] and we'll pass it on to the ads team who should be able to block that site. Thanks!
@Serebii Do you mean the mini-tournaments they mentioned? That's pretty neat.
@LordGeovanni i can make a whole perfect stats team in lesser than a day easily if u had an idea and having a shiny is a cosmetic and in an illegal ball too doesn't matter you're just trying to convince yourself that they beat you because they hacked meanwhile you can do the same team just not shiny this is a bad way for you to run from defeat when you lose against them think why you lost what your team lacked don't go just they hacked thats why i lost getting a perfect stat pokemon is super easy if you know what are you doing
I watched Pokken and finals of VGC Masters and went to sleep right after the final match ended because of work. I missed the annoucement for the next years place. Washington D.C. was a great location for World back in 2014. That was the only time I've been at World's and played TCG there. Even though I played poorly there I can recommend the event for any fans of competetive Pokemon games.
Wow, awesome report, looks like a fun time! Positivity of the community, must have been no mention of Verlisify then.
@Pokeman_noob
You are effectively attacking me saying that I suck because I'm not a hacker. Let me put some perspective into place for you. If you are hacking you are breaking the terms of service. You are deliberately counter venting practices in place to make the game fair. You are giving yourself an unreasonable benefit against people that do not hack.
First, you don't have to do any breeding, you don't have to do any hard catches in the wild, you don't have to breed down moves, you don't need to Super train which requires leveling that Pokemon up to 100. That's an awful lot of time that you can spend learning what the current meta game is instead. So you immediately steal time that you would not have available if you were playing legitimate.
Second, having perfect Pokemon allows you to specifically target certain things like having a 2 IV speed stat. Hackers can just plug that in but for everyone else you need to find the Pokemon in the wild with exactly two IV and then breed that into what you need instead. Considerably more difficult than just getting a Max IV with super training.
The fact that Shiny Pokemon and illegal balls are cosmetic actually underlines the problem. Shiny Pokemon take an unrealistic amount of time to find a legitimate competitive shiny. They are bragging about the fact that they are cheating the game. Illegitimate balls 100% prove without doubt that they are actively breaking the rules of the game to get a benefit.
You claim that you are able to make a battle competitive team within a week? One of the competitors in this event said that they forgot their 3DS and cartridge at home. That was with less than 24 hours before the event started. He somehow managed to get a 3DS and new copy of the game, managed to find 6 competitive ready Pokemon, with three of those being incredibly difficult Shiny to get, and was fully capable of participating in the event regardless of the fact he should have been an easy knockout without a good competitive team. And no he didn't find a way to transfer his old Pokemon. If you care, Verlisify did a video on this and prove that the new Pokemon are completely new with no ties to the previous Pokemon. Either this guy has ungodly luck and should rather spend it on finding lottos to donate to charity, or, which is much more likely, he cheated.
When the top 128 people in VGC have had at least 80 of them confirmed breaking the rules and still not punished in any way there is a problem. It does not matter how much you want to kick and scream this is a major problem.
@CosmoXY
People seem to hate on verlisify but his message, although poorly sent, still has truth in it. One of the competitors left their 3DS home, still manage to have a completely ready combat team in less than 24 hours notice with three of them being shiny and no ties to the previous Pokemon in any way. He has a video on that.
Even if you hate the guy, the ongoing problem is still a major problem.
I think the retro corner side event is the only official acknowledgement that Pokemon had for the existence of the Gamecube games in years, is so sad to not even have a reference of those games in the newer ones.
@LordGeovanni I am very sorry you feel that way. You may as well give up on Pokemon then.
Do they have a booth 'celebrating the positivity' that let's you send a C&D Order to someone who made a fan made game out of their love for the franchise? :')
@Heavyarms55
Oh I haven't bothered playing competitive since Gen 4. And I already know it's only gotten worse since then.
My bigger problem is how every generation seems to pander to more and more to casuals and children without letting them explore and learn on their own. I've been even more disappointed with Gen 6 and Gen 7 and I honestly don't have much expectation for 8 being any better.
@LordGeovanni By no means has cheating as you describe gotten worse since gen 4. Not remotely. In gen 4 you could easily have impossible Pokemon. Moves they could never learn, max EVs in every stat, wonder guard spiritomb... That is almost entirely absent now and much much harder to do.
I really think you should stop playing Pokemon, in any form. You don't seem to enjoy it. So why keep punishing yourself and complaining to others?
@Heavyarms55
In this case I would be saying worse as in more of an epidemic. Those hacks that you were referring to from Gen 4 were quite noticeable and eventually dealt with. These cheaters have things that appear to be perfect and therefore tournament organizers are willingly turning their heads and allowing it to happen despite the mathematical improbability of it all. And it is that exact problem that is allowing this to be much bigger now.
And who exactly are you to determine if I'm enjoying the game enough or not? If I see a problem with a game I'm enjoying, a game series that have grown up with, I'm going to speak out. You shouldn't really assume that you have the authority to tell me to stop playing based on that alone.
@LordGeovanni You have nothing positive to say about it, and seemingly endless issues and it's odd for me to think you don't enjoy it at all?
Whatever. I'm done. Do whatever you like.
@LordGeovanni @Heavyarms55 what you said is a little wrong instead of him dropping from pokemon ignore the the entire competitive scene and i didn't say such a thing like you suck at the game if you don't hack i said you hate it because you probably lost against one and instead of knowing why you lost you just assumed that hacking or more accurate generating mons gives you the upper hand and yes making an entire team in one day is possible if you had the items necessary and the team planned and if you say you don't have time for that then you should quit playing pokemon competitively and btw velisify is a toxic thorn in the community seeking only drama and fights with cool people like pimpnite and whatever that guy done hacked or not is he the first no is he the last no did he gain an advantage no generated mons="legal"mons
@Pokeman_noob Velisify is one of the absolute worst human beings on YouTube. Arrogant and self-righteous, he is a cancer in the community.
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