Hi there trainers!
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.
I’ve been writing a whole bunch of updates and articles on the Play! Pokemon circuit so far, but next week is… something different. It’s the start of the Asia Championship Series. What? Is that a regional championship? No, it’s different from what we usually see on the broadcasts.
The Asia Championship Series 2025
I’m not sure if this is always the name it had or that we used. Some community terms used for this series of qualifiers were ‘the summer circuit’ or ‘the TPC circuit (TPC overlooks Asia while TPCi overlooks the continents outside Asia). If you’re familiar with these terms; it’s this. But if you’re not familiar with this, let me explain. I want to emphasize however, that I am not an official source of information and don’t know the meticulous specifics other than what I can find myself.
In the continents outside of Asia, we have the Championship Series; a leaderboard system based on Championship Points. The Championship Points can be achieved by performing well in local tournaments, Regional Championships or International Championships. Asia doesn’t have this, and competitors from Asia are not able to get Championship Points. They have a different way of qualifying for the World Championships.
Do note, Asian competitors are able to qualify through the Championship Series by winning a Regional Championship or reaching top 4 at an International Championship – but this has yet to happen in GO.
Every season, players in some Asian countries can qualify through the Regional Qualifiers. This is one big remote tournament held in a country or one for multiple countries, and is usually played in a Swiss format. A top cut from this will advance to the Regional Playoffs – which is played in the Double elimination format – and a small number of best performers from this will qualify for the World Championships. The winner could even win a travel award!
While this sounds like an exciting format, it can be pretty rough as for many competitors. It could be their only chance at qualifying for the World Championships. The regions having a qualifier and playoffs like this for this season are as followed:
Some countries may not be included at all, and Japan has their own qualification system. We’ll get to that another time. First up, we have the India Regional Qualifiers!
The meta to expect
This will be the first official tournament where the new movesets are allowed. As such, the Indian competitors have not had much time to prepare, so it’s going to be a tournament of who is the best at adapting.
While the new move updates were live, new movesets were not allowed yet last week in Fortaleza and Vancouver. Pokémon like Azumarill and Dewgong were incredibly common, but I don’t think they’ll be as good this time around.
One Pokémon that really stood out was Golisopod. It has 3 different typings it can attack in: Shadow Claw for Ghost-type damage, X-Scissor for Bug-type damage and the recently buffed Aqua Jet for Water-type damage. Liquidation already was pretty decent, but Aqua Jet deals the same damage for 5 less energy, making it a really good charged attack.
Will Golisopod be this relevant again? X-Scissor is really useful for the Psychic-type Pokémon such as Malamar and Grumpig, but Lapras with Psywave isn’t weak to this and thus can defeat Golisopod. It also helps against Dark-type Pokémon, but most Dark-type Pokémon are fine against Golisopod because of the Ghost-type resistance and the secondary typing is usually Ghost or Flying, which makes X-Scissor a neutral attack.
I think that popular cores we can expect consist of Lapras and Sableye, with Drapion as again the prime neutral Pokémon in top usage and Wigglytuff as a threat to the many Dark- and Ghost-type Pokémon. I also think that Cradily in particular will perform extremely well due it’s quick access to Rock Tomb, which debuffs the opponent consistently AND deals a good chunk of damage. It can keep Lapras and Flying-type Pokémon in check, too.
There are so many possibilities in the new meta, and we’ll have to see what ideas the Indian battlers bring to the table.
Players to look out for
I don’t know how many players signed up, but it’s looking like 32 competitors can qualify for the Regional Playoffs. If I remember correctly, last season counted 352 competitors, of which 16 went into the Playoffs.
We haven’t seen many Indian competitors compete on stream before, as the Asia Qualifiers usually don’t have a stream. They’re held remote and online, so this is not an in-person tournament. The standout Indian competitor that many of us know is Beelzeboy. He won the 2024 Indian Playoffs, and then reached top 4 to win a trophy at the 2024 World Championships! That means he already is qualified for the 2025 World Championships too, so his only drive would be to win it all and get the travel award.
Beelzeboy tends to bring a mix of meta and anti-meta and usually has a good read on what the meta is going to look like. Pair that with top gameplay and expert predictions and you have a contender for winning a tournament.
Of course, there’s more contenders (if they will be competing another time) – players like NavaEmpire00, 1Scarletwiz and Hareesh118 that have had success before in the GO Battle League, grassroots formats and the previous Indian Qualifiers.
Closing words
That concludes this week’s article! For now, the goal of the competitors this weekend is to qualify for the Playoffs. From there on, players can qualify for the World Championships. How many spots there will be is not known at this time (to me, at least). What I can see on the website, is that 16 players in total from the Qualifiers combined can qualify.
It’s unlikely we’ll see a stream this week, so it’ll be until Stockholm until we see the new meta live. I am hopeful we see a usage chart, though.
You can find more information on the Asia Qualifiers here.
https://goasia-championship-2025.com
See you next time!
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