Pokémon TCG Worlds 2026: the San Francisco recap

I'll be honest: it's not necessarily the part of Pokémon that wins me over the most.

I also really like the kind of irrational part of this game. The story, the crowd, the deck nobody expected, the guy who believes in a list everybody called bad, the crazy decision that works. Maybe that's the part that makes me love Pokémon this much to this day.

But that's personal taste.

Because it would be impossible to look at what Andrew Hedrick is doing and not recognize how big this kid is.

The guy is a baby GOAT.

He already had a Regional, an International, he won Los Angeles this season and now he put a Worlds on the résumé.

He already sits at the table with the greats. I don't think there's much discussion left about that.

But before getting to that Sunday, that final and that last play against Cassiraga, a lot happened in San Francisco. And I think it's worth going back to the beginning.

Because Day 1 showed very quickly that this Worlds would not be as simple as “Dragapult is the best deck, so Dragapult is going to win”.

Day 1: yes, there was Dragapult everywhere

After a really nice opening ceremony, with an orchestra playing several themes from the Pokémon games, the Worlds metagame finally came out. And there wasn't much of a surprise.

We already knew Dragapult was the best deck in the format and that it would be played a lot. The question was how far that would go.

It went pretty far.

Out of the 774 lists identified by Limitless, 333 were some version of Dragapult, roughly 43% of the identified field.

There were 172 Dragapult, 81 Dragapult/Dusknoir, 76 Dragapult/Blaziken and a few smaller versions.

So that talk about Dragapult getting close to half of Worlds wasn't that far off.

After it, Basic Box was the main alternative with 73 players. N's Zoroark had 58, which leaves Zoroark as the third most played deck at Worlds when you count every version of Dragapult as a single archetype. Then we had Alakazam/Dudunsparce with 53, Slowking with 47 and Mega Excadrill with 32.

But looking at the metagame is one thing and watching the games is another. And there was plenty of cool stuff on day one.

Round 1: Fernando Cifuentes (Seaking / Festival Lead) vs. Shun Ito (Ogerpon / Meganium / Hydrapple)

Right in the first game of the stream we had Fernando Cifuentes, 2024 world champion, against Shun Ito.

Fernando was on a different version of Festival Lead, more focused on Seaking, and I liked the idea a lot. It even looked like an interesting matchup for him against Hydrapple.

In the first game Fernando managed to start very fast, put pressure on early and took it.

But I really liked how Shun played after that.

He started slowing Fernando's momentum down a bit and landed two Special Red Card during the game, getting badly in the way of what Festival Lead wanted to do.

In the end he managed to pull out a tie after losing the first game.

I thought it was a great series to open Worlds. Two different decks, a world champion at the table and a second game where Shun found a way to hold a matchup that looked pretty rough at first.

Round 6: Mateusz Łaszkiewicz (Alakazam / Dusknoir) vs. Piper Lepine (N's Zoroark)

This one was one of my favorite games of day one.

When I saw Mateusz against Piper, I thought we would probably be watching some Zoroark mirror.

Then Mateusz puts Alakazam/Dusknoir on the table.

And how cool is that, man.

Today I consider Mateusz one of the best deck builders in the game, so it's always fun when he shows up with some invention. And this time there were only four players in the entire Worlds on Alakazam/Dusknoir.

One of them finished 7th at Worlds.

It was him.

I was really happy to see the deck going that far, because besides building a deck really well, Mateusz plays his ass off.

On the other side was Piper Lepine on N's Zoroark, who is also an excellent player.

Zoroark was a deck I expected to do well precisely because of that. There were a lot of good players picking the archetype, and at a Worlds that matters more than the list.

The first and third games were pretty similar.

In the second one there wasn't much to analyze: Piper simply donks Mateusz.

It happens.

But in the other two games you could really understand what his deck wanted to do.

One thing I found very interesting was how Mateusz worked the Prize race.

He tried to stay at four Prizes and not just take more because he could. That way he avoided turning on some of his opponent's main comeback cards while he built the board he needed.

And then came the beautiful part of the deck.

The Dusknoir kept putting damage exactly where he wanted until he got to that turn where basically everything happened at once.

Against Zoroark that made the game very awkward for Piper, because Mateusz could control very well when he wanted to advance the Prize race.

It was beautiful to watch him pilot the deck.

You could tell he knew exactly the numbers he needed to hit, and he used basically the whole power of the list until he took the series.

Later we found out it wasn't just a cool invention to show up on stream.

The guy would actually take that all the way to the Top Cut.

Round 7: Vinicius Fernandez (N's Zoroark) vs. Sander Wojcik (Dudunsparce Control)

This one was also really cool.

The Brazilian king of Zoroark against the king of control.

Vini Fernandez against Sander Wojcik.

And I swear it took me a few minutes to understand what exactly Sander's win condition was.

His deck is really cool.

He had different walls to use depending on the matchup, with Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex being one of them, while Shuckle had a very important job of clearing the damage off the board.

It's that kind of Sander deck where you look at the list, look at the board and need a few minutes to understand where exactly he's trying to get.

In the first game, Vini plays really well.

He manages to find a Xerosic + Team Rocket's Watchtower play that breaks Sander's plan and takes the game.

But something happened here that, to me, ended up being very important to the result of the series.

Sander took too long to concede the first game.

He eventually concedes, but in my opinion he should have done it a few turns earlier.

That got even clearer when Game 2 started.

Because this time he already knew the line Vini had found.

Sander started saving his Stadiums better, managed to build the board a different way and kept getting exactly where he wanted.

The idea was to get a wall like Cornerstone Mask Ogerpon ex down and keep clearing damage off the board with Shuckle, until he got to a point where Vini simply couldn't make progress anymore.

And he got there.

To me, Vini was locked in that second game.

Except then the one resource Sander had no way to search for ran out:

time.

The clock ran out. Since Vini had won the first game, he took the series.

That's why I found that slower concession in Game 1 so important. If Sander had understood a few turns earlier that the game was already gone, he probably would have had more time to try to close the second one.

It doesn't mean he necessarily would have won.

But Game 2 was heading exactly toward the kind of spot his deck wanted.

Either way, I thought it was a great game from both. Vini found the answer in the first game, Sander managed to adapt in the second and, in the end, time management is part of playing Pokémon too.

What made it through the cut?

After the eight rounds of day one, now you could start looking at the metagame a different way.

Because knowing how many people picked a deck is one thing. Knowing how many got to keep playing on Saturday is another.

Dragapult's numbers here were pretty curious.

For the main versions, by the Limitless Labs numbers:

• Dragapult: 172 players → 22 in Day 2 (12.79%)

• Dragapult/Dusknoir: 81 → 8 (9.88%)

• Dragapult/Blaziken: 76 → 10 (13.16%)

For a deck that made up an absurd part of the field, the conversion was nothing absurd.

Meanwhile:

• Basic Box: 73 → 18 (24.66%)

• N's Zoroark: 58 → 12 (20.69%)

• Alakazam/Dudunsparce: 53 → 14 (26.42%)

• Slowking: 47 → 11 (23.40%)

• Mega Excadrill: 32 → 8 (25%)

There was one deck that simply destroyed those numbers.

Crustle.

There were only 20 players on the deck at Worlds.

Eight made Day 2. 40% conversion.

I really did think it wouldn't do that well. In the tier list I wrote that Crustle lives off how much the field disrespects it, and that in San Francisco everybody had already seen the crab.

But when you don't pay proper attention to an anti-game deck, this is what it does.

And it would get even better for Crustle on Saturday.

Day 2: now Worlds starts getting cruel

Day 2 is that moment that separates the boys from the men.

It might be a bit of a cliché line, but at Worlds it makes sense. You spend all of Friday playing against some of the best players in the world, you survive the first cut and, when you wake up on Saturday, you realize you're still very far from winning anything.

Just look at who didn't get there to understand the level of this tournament.

Tord Reklev, Ross Cawthon, Pedro Pertusi and several other players we're used to seeing fighting for Top Cut at Regionals and Internationals fell along the way.

Tord's case is almost cruel. He opened 5-0 at Worlds and then took three brutal losses, one after the other, in rounds 6, 7 and 8.

He finished on 15 points. The cut was at 16.

One of the best players in history was one point short of Day 2. A tie in any of those three rounds would have put him there.

And Sander Wojcik ended up in the same place: 15 points, 149th. Remember his game against Vini in Round 7, the one the clock closed? If he had managed to finish Game 2, the series would have been tied, he would have taken a point and made Day 2 on 16.

That's Worlds.

On Saturday the margin for error kept shrinking, and some stories that had started on day one started getting serious.

Crustle, which had already put 8 of its 20 players into Day 2, was still up there. Mateusz kept advancing with his Alakazam/Dusknoir. Diego Cassiraga showed up among the best in the world again, and Henry Chao was simply going through the tournament without losing.

But among the streamed games, two were the ones I liked most.

Round 10: Henry Chao (Dragapult ex / Dusknoir) vs. Jackson Ford (Dragapult ex / Blaziken ex)

Without a doubt one of the best games of Saturday for me.

And like every good Dragapult mirror, first we have to follow the protocol:

somebody has to brick.

In the first game there was basically no game. Dragapult does that sometimes and it's one of the reasons we play best of three. In the mirror especially, when one side starts playing and the other doesn't, it usually doesn't take long to end.

But after that the series got really good.

Jackson Ford played very well and got to the end of the game doing basically everything he needed to put himself in position to win.

Except the ending was absurd.

Henry gets to a turn where he needs to find a pretty specific line. And there was a play here that generated some discussion about whether it was the best possible line at that moment.

To me, it was.

He manages to find Boss's Orders and set up the knockout on Ford's Meowth ex using Moltres together with Dusknoir.

And that was it.

What I liked most was the reaction from both of them.

Henry's face when he realized he had found the line and, on the other side, Ford completely destroyed because he had played really well.

That's one of the cruelest things about Pokémon.

Sometimes you do everything right.

It doesn't mean you're going to win.

There are games where you can look back and clearly find the mistake that cost you. And there are games where you simply put your opponent in the “if he has it, he wins” spot.

Henry had it.

Incredible ending and a game played really well by both.

Maybe that was where it started becoming clear how big a Worlds Henry Chao was having.

He would finish the Swiss portion of the tournament without a single loss: 10-0-3.

Round 11: Joji Koyama (Mega Lopunny ex / Bronzong / Dusknoir) vs. Andrew Hedrick (Dragapult ex / Crushing Hammer)

If the previous game was the most exciting one for me, this one was maybe the one I enjoyed watching the most technically.

It was a master class from Andrew Hedrick playing Dragapult.

Joji's deck had Bronzong, an extremely annoying card for Dragapult because it can stop the opponent from evolving Pokémon from hand on the following turn.

And Dragapult, obviously, needs to evolve.

So you watch the game and it looks like Joji is always trying to put a barrier in front of Andrew. Lock an evolution, delay a Dragapult, force him to find another route.

Except Andrew keeps finding it.

That's what was cool about this game.

He doesn't play expecting the deck to work normally. As Bronzong keeps changing how he can develop the board, Andrew changes the way he plays right along with it.

He accepts a few weirder turns, sets up other lines and keeps finding room even when the game looks locked.

It was one of those games where it becomes very easy to understand why this guy wins so much.

The kid plays his ass off.

And that would get an even bigger demonstration later, because he would face a Crustle in the Top 8 and win.

Absurd of a player.

And then came the cut

After Saturday's Swiss rounds, the picture got very interesting.

Henry Chao had gone through undefeated, with 10 wins and 3 ties.

Brent Tonisson was 11-1-1.

Andrew Hedrick, 11-2.

Satoshi Matsui, 11-2.

Mateusz, with that Alakazam/Dusknoir invention that showed up on Day 1, was 10-1-2.

And Rune Heiremans kept making the impossible look normal with Crustle: 10-0-3, undefeated in Swiss just like Chao, with the deck only twenty people brought.

The Worlds format also created a fun situation at the cut. Since there were players tied on the qualifying line, we had 10 players advancing to the elimination stage, but the top six got a bye.

That left a small play-in to close out the Top 8. Nathan Spry faced Öjvind Svinhufvud and Diego Cassiraga faced Kian Amini.

Nathan and Diego won, and we finally had the eight players who could still be world champion:

I really like this Top 8 because it sums the tournament up perfectly.

Dragapult started Worlds as almost half the field and put three players in the Top 8.

Alakazam, which ended up having one of the best performances of the tournament, put two completely different versions there.

And that Crustle that started with only 20 players?

Two of them were in the Top 8 of Worlds.

One in every ten Crustle pilots at Worlds finished among the eight best in the world. It's bizarre.

In the middle of all that there was also Nathan Spry on Ogerpon Box.

It wasn't exactly the Top 8 I would have drawn before the tournament. But looking at everything that had happened in the first two days, it made a lot of sense.

And there ended the relatively calm part of Worlds. Now there were no more ties, no resistance, no next round.

You lose, you're done.

The Top Cut

In the quarters, Andrew Hedrick knocked out Satoshi Matsui, Brent Tonisson knocked out Nathan Spry, Diego Cassiraga knocked out Rune Heiremans and Henry Chao knocked out Mateusz Łaszkiewicz.

Both Crustle fell to exactly the two finalists: Rune to Cassiraga, Satoshi to Hedrick.

In the semis, Hedrick beat Tonisson in the Dragapult mirror and Cassiraga beat Chao, knocking out the only player who had gotten that far without losing a series.

The final: two generations of Pokémon TCG

The final is really nice to talk about because, to me, it represents two different generations of Pokémon TCG.

On one side, Diego Cassiraga, who has been playing Pokémon for almost as many years as Andrew Hedrick has been alive.

On the other, Andrew.

I almost see it as a pre and post-Limitless thing.

Diego comes from a generation that played when a lot of what we have today simply didn't exist. Andrew represents this new generation of absurd preparation, data, matchups studied down to the last detail, thousands of games and basically no decision made without a reason.

Both of them are already among the best.

My rooting interest, obviously, was for Diego.

A family man, older, and still playing Pokémon at the highest level? Damn, let's give some love to the guy with a day job too.

On top of that, he's really good to Brazilians. I've always heard everybody speak very well of him, we've crossed paths a few times and it was always easy. So I really wanted to see the guy lift the trophy again nine years later.

There was just one small problem.

On the other side was the Ice Man.

Andrew Hedrick.

And let me tell you something: if you sit across from this kid, please, do yourself a favor.

Don't misplay.

He punishes.

He had already done it against Ivanoff in another final and, on the biggest stage there is, he did it again.

Game 1

The first game starts so strong for Andrew that I saw a lot of people already treating it as basically decided.

Right on the second turn he starts that classic Dragapult sequence: Drakloak draws, finds another Drakloak, which draws again, finds more resources and, before you notice, the turn that looked like it had nothing already has everything.

Andrew manages to put pressure on very early and gets to attack first, leaving Diego in a spot where he had to answer immediately.

It was basically: you have Rare Candy now or the game starts running away.

Diego tries.

He even has to put down Fezandipiti ex to look for more cards.

But the Candy doesn't show up.

From there the game starts happening much more at the speed Andrew wanted than at Diego's.

But one thing I really liked in the final was exactly Cassiraga's calm.

Because the game looked like it was slipping away and he didn't fall apart.

He kept drawing, building the hand, finding the Alakazam and, little by little, getting back into a game that looked lost a few turns earlier.

Andrew was still in control, but that was no longer the easy win it looked like at the start.

Diego actually got very close. One more turn and that game could have looked completely different.

The final was good.

Game 2

And then the second one starts. This time the one who starts better is Diego.

And Andrew also prizes two Budew.

At that point I think a lot of people thought the same thing:

“Alright. Now we're getting a Game 3.”

Except this game kept getting stranger and stranger.

Diego was ahead, but he wasn't drawing exactly what he needed.

The deck was drying up, the hand growing, he kept going through cards, but the damn Air Balloon he needed for Genesect simply wouldn't show up.

And that mattered because Diego wanted to keep Genesect running and protect himself from Andrew's disruption. Mainly because he knew that if he took a heavy hand reduction and couldn't recover, he'd be giving Dragapult exactly what it wants most: time.

Because of that, he avoids a knockout at a moment where he could have attacked. After that there was no way to avoid it anymore.

Andrew makes a play I found really interesting.

He puts Meowth ex out there basically as a sacrifice.

It's almost a:

“Go ahead and kill it. I'll give you two Prizes and then you eat a Special Red Card.”

Diego sees the problem.

Instead of just taking the Meowth, he uses Boss's Orders and goes for a knockout on the bench, trying not to walk into exactly the deal Andrew was offering.

The game goes on. And there comes a moment where, honestly, Andrew looked done for.

Diego had the advantage, a huge hand and was very close to closing that game out.

Except he also knew any disruption at that moment could be fatal.

He uses Eri trying to take one of those possibilities out of the way, but he can't find what he needed.

And then comes maybe the most expensive decision of the whole Worlds.

Diego attaches Lucky Helmet.

The name couldn't be better.

Because luck is exactly what he didn't get.

The beanie Cassiraga has worn for over 20 years has already become a meme, and right at that moment the thing that needed to bring him luck was another Helmet entirely.

Except it was exactly the opposite.

The Tool that was supposed to help Diego ended up becoming one of the pieces of Andrew's win condition.

Here's the difference that decided Worlds.

Diego was looking at the game trying not to lose to disruption and trying to find a way to close it out.

Andrew was looking at how many cards were still left in Diego's deck.

Cassiraga still had a way out.

He could have started recycling Dudunsparce along with the cards attached to it, putting resources back into the deck and avoiding running out of cards.

But he didn't see that line in time.

Andrew did.

And from there the Ice Man starts building the last play.

He puts a resource on Dunsparce, manages exactly how many cards Diego still has to draw and understands he doesn't need to win that game by taking Prizes anymore.

In fact, he hadn't taken a single one.

Andrew only needed Diego to draw more than he could.

And he attacks.

Lucky Helmet triggers.

Diego draws.

By that point you could already tell what was happening.

Andrew had found the win condition.

Diego hadn't.

That's maybe the cruelest part of playing against someone at that level.

Andrew is basically saying:

“Misplay. Misplay and I won't forgive it.”

Diego misplayed.

Andrew didn't.

And Andrew Hedrick became the 2026 Pokémon TCG world champion by winning the second game of the final without taking a single Prize.

By deck-out.

An epic ending for a really good Worlds. And there's a financial cruelty in the middle of all this too.

Twenty thousand dollars in one decision

First place: $50,000.

Second place: $30,000.

We'll never know what would have happened if Diego had found the right line at that moment. Maybe he still loses. Maybe there's a Game 3. Maybe he's a two-time world champion.

Pokémon doesn't work that way.

But there's a reality where that decision may have been worth twenty thousand dollars.

And I know the sadness for Diego stays. I was rooting for him.

I really wanted to see a guy from his generation, a family man, nine years after the first title, lifting another trophy.

But you also can't walk away from that final thinking only about Cassiraga's mistake.

Because on the other side there was a human AI waiting for that mistake to happen.

Andrew Hedrick isn't normal.

He may not represent exactly the part of Pokémon that moves me the most, like I said at the start of this article, but maybe that even increases my respect for what he does.

Because this kid works on the cardboard.

And he works a lot.

The world title is in great hands.

That's a fact.

Worlds is over. So now what?

And that's how the competitive part of Worlds ended.

Except the 2027 season has already started. Baltimore is September 18 to 20, and our Recife comes on October 3 and 4.

And I'm really excited for the start of this season.

Until Recife, I promise to give myself to this game like I've rarely done in my life.

But then comes the part of the closing ceremony I like the most: what are they going to come up with for our game now, and where are we going to be a year from now?

For the TCG we got a few pieces of news.

First they showed new Mega attack rares of Mega Rayquaza ex, Mega Darkrai ex, Mega Greninja ex and Mega Zygarde ex, plus the arrival of Mega Lucario Z ex.

Honestly? Pretty. But not very important to me. Lol.

Pokémon knows how to make a pretty card, and these probably won't even be that expensive. But put the whole collection together a few years from now and the price of a used car shows up. What I really wanted to know was what came next.

And then it showed up:

Pokémon ex★.

Raikou, Entei and Suicune.

I liked it.

What I can't do is imagine what they're going to base it on. Pokémon showed the ex★ name and the three legendaries, and explained nothing about how these cards are going to work.

And that's where the fun part of speculating begins.

Will it be something like VSTAR, with some power or attack you can only use once per game?

Will it be a reference to the old Pokémon ☆ from the EX era, where you could only have one Pokémon Star in the deck?

Or will it be something completely different?

No idea. But if it goes that way, an Ability or a once-per-game attack, it's going to be really cool.

Let's wait and see.

Pokémon is getting a movie... about playing Pokémon TCG

Now here's something I wasn't expecting to see at that ceremony: a movie about the TCG.

They announced Pokémon: Wild Card, a new animated film coming in 2027.

The story is going to follow a Pokémon TCG player trying to become champion, along with a Mimikyu.

Damn.

Now you've got me.

The film is being produced by STORY inc. together with CloverWorks.

That one I want to watch.

And Worlds 2027 is going to be in... Singapore

And then came that classic announcement that closes out every Worlds: the next city.

After San Francisco, the Pokémon World Championships is going back to Asia.

Singapore.

Worlds 2027 will be August 13 to 15 at the Singapore EXPO, with Championship Sunday at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.

It'll be the first time Singapore hosts a Worlds and only the fourth time in history the event happens outside the United States, after Vancouver, London and Yokohama.

And I liked the choice a lot. First because it's different.

The last few years we had Honolulu, Anaheim and San Francisco. Going back to Asia completely changes the face of the event.

There's an interesting detail behind it.

During Worlds itself, Chris Brown, Pokémon's director of Global Esports and Events, said they want Worlds to keep traveling the world.

The problem is that the event got huge.

These days they need to find a city with an enormous space for the tournament and the whole experience around it, plus an arena capable of hosting Championship Sunday.

And Singapore has both: the EXPO for the tournament and the Indoor Stadium for the finals. On top of that it's one of the biggest air hubs in Asia, in a region where Pokémon is massive.

Pokémon didn't officially say “we picked Singapore for these reasons”, so I don't want to invent an explanation here. But you can see why a city with that infrastructure made the list.

Now for the bad part.

It's fucking far.

And it probably won't be a cheap trip out of Brazil.

But I'll leave that as a problem for 2027 Sonson to solve.

Because I'm going to try.

I'm not promising Worlds, because to get there you've got a whole season and a lot of people who play Pokémon much better than I do in the way.

But since we made it this far in this article, I'm going to ask you one thing:

root for me.

Who knows, maybe next year the Worlds recap starts a little differently.