Hi everyone!
I’m Leonardo (known in-game as CLeonardo77), and I’ll be writing here on Dracoviz about usage data and meta analysis for the Play! Pokémon circuit.
The 2025–2026 season of Pokémon GO Regionals is already in full swing, with four tournaments completed so far. The most recent stops, Milwaukee (USA) and Belo Horizonte (Brazil), offered two fascinating snapshots of the current competitive scene, showcasing both global staples and striking regional twists.
Alongside the familiar names, new contenders are already carving out space for themselves. In Milwaukee, Meteorfallian delivered the perfect comeback after a disappointing Worlds, soaring to victory with his Fearow (and Bastiodon, the second in a row to win a Regional this year so far! ) an incredibly tense grand finals against IIIPranavIII. Meanwhile, in Belo Horizonte, Zarddy reclaimed what was once his a couple of years ago: the crown of Brazil’s most decorated player. However, the competition at the top is fiercer than ever. After just four Regionals, three champions hail from Brazil: LNDsTSteinar, LNDsRargef, and Zarddy, each demonstrating remarkable composure under pressure and surgical precision in their decision-making.
North America and LATAM have always displayed distinct competitive identities, and these events were no exception. The usage data highlights some key divergences in playstyle and team composition – differences we’ll be unpacking in detail throughout this article.
Overall Pokémon usage: similarities and differences (Full Tournament and Top Cut)
Both Milwaukee and Belo Horizonte leaned heavily on meta-defining staples such as well-known Cradily/Gastrodon/Corsola, underscoring their global dominance. Out of the overall top 20, 17 picks show comparable usage across the two tournaments: towards the tail of the graph, we can see Florges, Stunfisk and Tinkaton being under-used by Belo Horizonte competitors, compared with their colleagues in Milwaukee. On the other side, we can see a slightly higher usage in Belo Horizonte for Azumarill, Scizor and Kanto Marowak, with the last two being present almost exclusively as shadow variants. It’s also interesting to see how, on average, players from Brazil relied a tad less on the Cradily/Corsola pair, suggesting slight regional adaptations, possibly influenced by scrim culture. These differences continue appearing when we peek at the distribution of the top 21-30 Pokémon used in both tournaments:
Dedenne, once a meta staple, seems to have fallen out of grace as Cradily and mud-slappers have claimed the meta for themselves: a small percentage of trainers from Milwaukee are still showing the fairy-electric type some love, even though players in Belo Horizonte definitely don’t see it that way.
Another interesting fact is the Murkrow usage: being popularised in Monterrey Regionals, (thus having a LATAM certification mark), no one in Belo Horizonte chose to trust the little crow. Conversely, it did gain a lot of trust in Milwaukee, with one silver medal and two top 8 placements.
Pokemon Usage – Top 32 vs Overall Field
When we focus on the Top 32 finishers, the picture of what truly carried players into the points becomes crystal clear. Some Pokémon not only held their ground; they soared in prominence. Others lost footing, unable to convert general popularity into competitive success. Below, we dissect the most striking overperformers in Milwaukee and Belo Horizonte, and explore what these shifts tell us about each region’s high-level meta.
- Milwaukee – Overperformers
- Cradily: 71% → 84%
- Galarian Corsola: 47% → 62%
- Tinkaton: 5% → 12%
- Forretress: 11% → 28%
- Belo Horizonte – Overperformers
- Cradily: 60% → 72%
- Galarian Corsola: 38% → 56%
- Galarian Moltres: 25% → 50%
- Tinkaton: 3% → 31%
- Florges: 6% → 19%
Cradily and Galarian Corsola cemented themselves as defensive cornerstones. Their sizeable jumps indicate that, beyond field-level popularity, these two provided the consistency and bulk needed to grind out shield-starved matchups.
Forretress’s leap in Milwaukee is particularly telling: vaulting from a niche pick to over a quarter of Top 32 teams suggests it was the most successful Cradily counter. However, this seems to be mainly due to regional differences, as the same Pokémon had an opposite trend in Belo Horizonte, despite having a comparable 9-11% of usage at the beginning of Day 1. Galarian Moltres’s dramatic doubling in usage for Belo Horizonte reveals a local appetite for a Pokémon able to burn shields early, capitalising on aggressive openings, still maintaining an average amount of bulk (this might thus explain why Moltres was preferred to Murkrow); Florges also proved to be successful for Belo Horizonte contenders when it came to get into the point zone, even though same does not apply for Milwaukee. However, Tinkaton’s eye-watering +28% percentage points jump is what definitely marks it as Belo Horizonte’s true meta-breaker (it also got a not-too-shabby +150% increase in Milwaukee). Players across both Regionals clearly trusted its useful sets of resistances to power through team comps, probably not prepared enough.
Conclusion and Looking Forward
- Cradily and Galarian Corsola confirmed their status as the defensive backbone across both Milwaukee and Belo Horizonte, proving that bulk and energy denial remain non-negotiable at the highest level.
- Regional T-32 metas diverged sharply: Milwaukee rewarded control-oriented picks like Forretress to offensively punish Cradily, whereas Belo Horizonte players preferred to counter Cradily with a defensive strategy, absorbing its energy and stalling the timer with Tinkaton.
- Going forward, trainers should build around the proven defensive staples while dedicating at least one slot to regional tech picks that exploit the local meta’s vulnerabilities. The Pokémon on the rise will be, in my opinion Fearow: people have now seen how good it can be, and this will surely cause an increase in electric types (Charjabug) as well as other adaptations (more diverse ground types, such as Steelix and Stunfisk to fill both electric and ground role) that will inevitably result in a slight meta shift. With two Regionals in Europe back-to-back at the end of October, it will be interesting to see how results in Lille will affect players’ last minute preparations for the subsequent appointment in Gdańsk.
See you next time!