2026 Pokémon VGC
World Championship
Competitive Pokémon is played two against two, everything at level 50, over three days of best of three matches. You register six Pokémon and take four into each game, and you choose those four while looking at your opponent's six. This page covers the Masters Division: how the format works, what changed when the circuit moved to Pokémon Champions, the results, and all 395 registered teams.
The six Takuma Yamazaki registered. At the start of a match both players get 90 seconds to look at each other's six and select four. Selecting four here shows which two would have sat out.
Start here
How VGC works
VGC is the official Pokémon video game championship series, and it's played as doubles. If the last Pokémon you played was a single player game, most of what you know about battling doesn't carry over.
Both players have two Pokémon out at the same time. You give an order to each of them every turn, and either one can be attacked.
You register six and bring four to each game. Both players see the other's six before choosing. You can pick a different four for the next game.
Every Pokémon is set to level 50 in battle, so there's nothing to gain by grinding. The difference comes down to team building and play.
Matches are best of three. Each game runs on a seven minute clock, with 90 seconds for Team Preview and 45 seconds per turn.
No two Pokémon on your team can hold the same item, and you can't register the same species twice.
You submit your six on paper before the event, listing abilities, items and moves. That sheet is locked for the rest of the tournament and judges check against it.
Why doubles is harder
With four Pokémon on the field, you're making two decisions per turn at the same time your opponent makes theirs. Moves resolve in speed order, so both your orders are locked in before you know what either of theirs will be. A lot of the difficulty is just working out which of your two they're about to attack.
Which is why Protect turns up on 1,658 of the 2,370 Pokémon registered at Worlds. Seven in ten. It blocks a turn of damage, so one of your Pokémon can sit a guess out while the other does something.
What's on a team
Most teams follow a rough shape. Something to do the damage, something to control speed with a move like Tailwind, something to disrupt with Fake Out, and then two or three more to cover whatever the first few lose to.
You'll see it repeatedly in the 395 sheets below, and you'll see the same names doing the same jobs.
The 2026 change
Everything moved to Pokémon Champions
Pokémon Champions came out on 8 April 2026. There's no overworld and no story in it, just battling. Every premier event from the Indianapolis Regionals in May onwards has run on it, and San Francisco was the first World Championship played on something other than a mainline Pokémon game. Before this, competing meant buying the current mainline title and spending weeks breeding and training before you could test anything.
| Mechanic | Scarlet & Violet | Champions |
|---|---|---|
| IVs | Hidden values from 0 to 31 per stat, fixed the moment you got the Pokémon. Fixing bad ones meant breeding for them or Hyper Training. | Gone. Every Pokémon is treated as having 31 in all six stats. |
| EVs | 510 effort values spread across six stats, capped at 252 each. At level 50 it took 8 EVs to buy one point of stat. | Now called Stat Points. 66 per Pokémon, 32 max in any one stat, and a point is worth exactly one stat. Roughly the same budget without the division. |
| Natures | 25 natures, each raising one stat by 10 percent and dropping another. Changing one meant tracking down a Mint. | Now called Stat Alignment. Same effect, 21 options instead of 25, and you pay in game currency to change it. |
| Getting a team | Catch, breed and train each Pokémon yourself, or import one from Pokémon HOME. | Build them in the game. HOME imports still work, and anything you bring over gets its stats brought up to standard. |
| Battle gimmick | Terastallization. Any Pokémon could change its type once per battle. | Mega Evolution. Only some Pokémon have one, it takes up the held item slot, and you get one per battle. |
| Rule updates | Regulation letters tied to whatever the mainline game supported. | Regulation sets ship on their own schedule. M-A from May, then M-B from 17 June to 9 September, which is what Worlds was played on. |
The one Mega you get
A Mega Stone takes up the held item slot, so a Mega costs that Pokémon its Focus Sash or its Choice Scarf. You also only get one Mega Evolution per battle across the whole team, and if that Pokémon faints you don't get another.
So the numbers look strange at first. All 395 teams brought a Mega Stone, and 296 brought two or more, knowing they could only ever use one. What the spare buys is the decision. You see your opponent's six in Team Preview, then choose which Mega the game is going to be about.
What the sheets don't tell you
A sheet lists species, ability, held item, Stat Alignment and four moves. It doesn't list Stat Point spreads, the same way it never listed EV spreads under the old system.
So you can see that someone's Basculegion is Adamant with a Life Orb, but not whether they put the points into bulk or speed. Working that out is part of the match.
Computed from all 395 registered sheets
What the field brought
These are counts from the 395 published Masters sheets. Usage is the share of teams that registered a given Pokémon, so 52.7 percent for Kingambit means 208 of the 395 teams had one.
Most registered Pokémon
Share of the 395 teams
Most registered Mega Stones
Share of the 395 teams · only one can be used per battle
The most registered teams
The 395 players brought 151 different teams between them, counting a team as its six species and ignoring items and spreads. 107 of those were registered by one player and nobody else. The other end of the range is below: 51 players sat down with the same six.
Most registered moves
Across all 2,370 Pokémon
Stat Alignments chosen
Champions' replacement for Natures
Where the field came from
38 countries represented
Final standings
Top eight
Day 1 was eight rounds of Swiss, and two losses or fewer got you into Day 2. Day 2 added four more rounds before the cut to a Top 8 single elimination bracket. All of it best of three.
The matches on record
The published bracket doesn't include quarterfinal scores, so they aren't here.
An all Japanese final
Yamazaki and Onishi shared four of their six Pokémon: Kingambit, Basculegion, Garchomp and Floette. That's about as clear a picture of the format as you'll get. Yamazaki's sixth slot was a Dragonite holding Dragoninite, so he went into every game with two Mega Stones and one Mega Evolution to spend.
Third and fourth brought the same team
Zachary Weed and João Felipe Leite finished third and fourth with the same six: Froslass, Sneasler, Lycanroc, Basculegion, Kingambit and Scovillain. The same held items on all six, too. They diverge on one Stat Alignment and two movesets. Both lost their semifinal to a Japanese player.
The full record
All 395 team sheets
Every Masters team, in finishing order. Search by player or trainer name, filter by country or by Pokémon, and open a row for the full sheet.