Hey there trainers!
We’re now 4 months in the Play! Pokemon season, and the next tournament marks the first one in the new Dual Destiny meta!
My name is Martijn – you may know me as Inadequance. I am the 2024 Worlds finalist, and I’ll be writing most of these articles! The goal is to write the many tournaments that will be held globally as one big storyline.
All tournaments from after the LAIC, up until and including the EUIC will count for the NAIC Travel Award. This means that all players start with a ‘clean sheet’ for this race (that includes the points from locals, even if players are already capped on 4), but the current points are retained and used for the Worlds Travel Award.
There will be 2 tournaments taking place in the weekend of week 49; in Bogotá, Colombia and in Perth, Australia. But before we look into those tournaments, let’s recap the tournament of last weekend, in Stuttgart.
Stuttgart recap
The numbers of the European tournaments haven’t been so hot lately, but Stuttgart actually saw an increase in competitors! The tournament counted 114 registered competitors, which is the most Stuttgart has hosted so far. It’s hosted in a relatively inconvenient spot if you want to visit the city, as it takes approx. 25 minutes by train from the venue to there. That said, it is perfect if you’re just quickly competing though. That’s what I did! The airport, venue and a few hotels are within 5 to 10 minutes of walking distance from each other, so that’s pretty nice.
Oh right, the tournament. On larger scale, the Europeans went with hard and safe meta. That top 3 usage, that’s no joke right there. There was a huge surge in Air Slash Mandibuzz, probably influenced by the Sacramento Championships the weekend before.
Day 2 was different though. The players coming in from the winners bracket (who all ended up being top 4 too) had some wicked spice on their teams. Myself with the Forretress and Shadow Drifblim, TontonBatteuse with a modified version of his Lille team with the Charjabug, Greninja and Skarmory core and PvpDavid with the Toxapex, Diggersby and Shadow Typhlosion. I guess the team of Stonecollection does look kind of dull, but don’t be fooled. That is actually a Clodsire with Sludge Bomb and Stone Edge… I guess it makes sense now he had four Water-type Pokémon, because he really needed to cover Ground-types hard.
With previous tournament winners like myself and TontonBatteuse in the running, it really was a 50/50 whether we’d see a new champion rise up in Stuttgart. But that was changing up real quickly once Stonecollection and PvpDavid07 reached the winners finals. The spice of myself and TontonBatteuse was not enough to reach far enough, but at least far enough for both of us to (finally) face off, and add another medal to our collection. Stonecollection had none of that repeated-tournament-winners nonsense and steamrolled TontonBatteuse in the losers finals, only to be defeated again by PvpDavid (after a sick 3-0 bracket reset though). That meant a brand new Play! Pokemon champion was crowned in Stuttgart!
PvpDavid just kind of gave us a sneak peek of what the new meta may look like. The Rage Fist nerf that was first mentioned in the blog later was removed, and it’ll make Annihilape the prime fighter for the next season too. It was great at winning the lead so David could RPS in the back. In a meta where Alolan Sandslash, Diggersby and Bibarel are now all buffed and hard check the new Galarian Corsola, Annihilape is set to terrorize the Dual Destiny meta too.
And another thing we learnt… if you ever thought about running Clodsire with Sludge Bomb and Stone Edge, DON’T DO IT! While it does check both Azumarill and Flying-type Pokémon a bit better, it now loses to opposing Clodsire, it does worse into Annihilape and… how many times I thought that Stonecollection had a good lead when he led Clodsire into Toxapex… The Toxapex beat the Clodsire with that moveset.
Not that we see Toxapex back for a while anyway.
Meta prediction
The meta is going to shift up a bit! I’ll be honest, I’m kind of blank on what a ‘new meta’ team would look like. I’m not even sure if we’ll see a lot of changes. The improvements of Thunder Shock and the fang fast attacks open the door for a lot of improvements. It feels like a slight nerf to both Azumarill and Feraligatr, but I think most of the current meta Pokémon will remain relevant. Think of Alolan Sandslash, Serperior, Dunsparce and Galarian Moltres. The Pokémon taking a really big hit I think is Clodsire – it does not see a nerf, but the Fire Punch for Diggersby IS huge and that is the prime counter to Clodsire.
With Diggersby being buffed and coming back to top meta immediately, I also think that this Galarian Corsola hype is a big ball of cope. This comes from a stance where I tried a million drafts to make Giratina work in the Max Out meta, where Normal- and Dark-types were also prevalent. But now, Diggersby is THE Pokémon to counter.
Now, the tournaments. I hope I don’t disappoint a lot of people with this, but these are some tournaments I don’t have a lot of knowledge on. They will likely have very small numbers too. Bogotá counted 18 competitors last season, and Perth counted 27.
Bogotá
Bogotá counted 18 competitors, of which 3 were not from Colombia. Pretty cool to see some of the more local players show up here. Keep in mind the distances between countries and some Championship locations in South America are huge, and many competitors can’t afford to travel between the tournaments. This actually makes for a coincidental but great point to segment into me explaining the difference between a Special and Regional Championship – because we have both of those this weekend actually.
Just like most North American and European tournaments, Perth is a Regional Championship. A Regional Championship requires an entry fee, and awards you with prize money if you make it far.
But Bogotá is a Special Championship. In Europe, Special Championships are free to enter! But if you win one like I did, you don’t win any prize money. Usually. Because it’d be up to the Tournament Organizer to award that or not. But what I learnt this season is that most Special Championships in South America do require an entry free to participate. The prize money is still optional only though, and they usually have unofficial trophies like a plaque.
Do you see the connection now? Not having a lot of money into not winning any or a lot of money makes it hard to draw in many competitors and provide equal opportunities amongst South America. It does make it more appealing for international competitors fighting for the Travel Awards and Worlds qualification.
Jacoloco2 is the reigning Bogotá Special Champion. With two top cuts in North America, he makes for an excellent competitor to take these opportunities and convert them into a lot of Championship Points.
His latest tournament was the 2024 World Championships, and that didn’t go super well for Jacoloco. If anything, it will be a challenge for Jacoloco to try his hands again at in-person competition as it has been almost 4 months ago now.
That said, don’t count out the local competition too. Camilo2016 is a well known player in the GO Battle League and reached top 50 on the leaderboards before. Last season they reached top 3 in Bogotá, so they make for an excellent local player to keep the title in Colombia.
Perth
Perth takes place on the west coast of Australia. The majority of Australia lives on the east coast – so it’s quite out of the way for many Australian competitors. Just for your insight of distance; it’s about a 6 hour flight between Sydney and Perth – a distance similar to New York – Los Angeles.
For that reason, Perth usually doesn’t have a lot of competitors. At the time of writing, the tournament counts 33 competitors. Luckily, I had PvPSteveeeeeeeeeeee help me out on players to look out for!
First off, of course, the reigning champion of Perth. This is none other than RicFlareon! Arguably the best competitor from Australia at the moment, he competed in most Australian regional championships but is also the Australian who has competed a lot on the international stage too!
RicFlareon is one of the two Australians using their LAIC Travel Award to compete there, and he got a decent result with a good amount of Championship Points to snowball right into the EUIC Travel Award.
The EUIC Travel Award was earned solely through local tournaments. Now that the first Regional Championship in Australia is coming up, it’ll provide an opportunity for other trainers as well to fight for the NAIC Travel Award. As said before, the players from Australia could really use that extra prize money to fund the long trip to Europe or the Americas.
Next up is avrip! You may also know him as GOHubAvrip – he also writes articles for PokemonGOHubNet. But he’s\ pretty good at the game too! Avrip brings a lot of international experience with him and along with RicFlareon, has fought through the hordes of Bastiodon
I don’t know why Australian competitors love that Pokémon so much but there were so many of them.
He just came back from a trip to India, and apparently won a challenge in a stacked Perth local challenge the weekend before. Avrip just came back from a trip and is ready to get back in action. Along with RicFlareon, I think they’re the favourites to win it here.
But of course, there are more competitors. Since there are so few Regional Championships in Australia, the Regionals individually become extremely important as they are the few chances competitors have to excel in Championship Points next to the usual local championships.
With that in mind, competitors like mikeymorgs and Zeetarb are looking to get some of those very important Championship Points too. Mikeymorgs is not just a really chill dude (we met when him and FishOnAHeater visited Bologna!) but also qualified for the 2023 and 2024 World Championships! He doesn’t have many Championship Points as far as I’ve seen, so if he wants his hands on an NAIC Travel Award he’s gotta perform well here and bump it up with some local tournaments.
The latter, Zeetarb is a name we haven’t seen a lot from… yet. Zeetarb reached top 4 in Perth last season and qualified for the 2024 World Championships. Perth counted for the 2025 LAIC Travel Award, and he used that to compete in Buenos Aires and the LAIC! While his performances there weren’t as successful, he did get more wins than losses.
Closing Words
That’ll be it for this weeks article! I am very much hoping we get to see a community broadcast like PvPSteveeeeeeeee organised for last Perth, but I don’t have any confirmation on that just yet. Hopefully soon, because I’d love to take a peek at the new meta!
Great news; PvPSteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeve will be broadcasting the Perth Championship on his Twitch stream!
As always, you can find the link to the bracket and the broadcast here.
https://www.dracoviz.com/2025-bogota
https://www.dracoviz.com/2025-perth
See you next time!!