Hi there trainers!
We’re back to the Championship Series schedule, and this week will be the first time the new meta is live broadcasted.
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.
From here on, all points gained from tournaments held after the EUIC up until and including the NAIC will count for the 2025 LAIC travel award. The total, of course, will count for the Worlds qualification and Travel Award.
Now this might be the first BROADCASTED tournament in this meta, it’s not the actual first tournament in it. The Indian Qualifiers took place last week!
The Indian Qualifiers
If you missed last week’s article, here’s a short recap on what the Indian Qualifiers exactly are.
The Indian Qualifiers is part of the Asia Championship Series where a few countries in Asia get one tournament a season – the Qualifiers. This is played remotely in a Swiss format, and a top cut of best performers proceed to a Playoffs, which are held later (and teams can be changed). The top cut of that will qualify for the World Championships.
In the case of India, they now have their top cut of 32 competitors! The Indian Qualifiers counted approximately 260 competitors, but the whole usage was in my opinion not a representation of what the meta would look like moving forward. There were various picks included that are not exactly PvP viable, such as Blissey (and surprise, none of the Blissey made it to top cut).
The top cut usage however, has way more picks that are likely to rise up in the tournaments to come. While there’s still a lot of diversity, I just want to point out one specific Pokémon; the Melmetal from vbasist60 (top 4 on graphic 1). You may already have seen the videos on YouTube about it (as far as I saw from PvPSteve and HomeSliceHenry) – it is a mediocre Pokémon that has insane corebreaking potential to the top meta. Drapion, Cradily, Lapras, Azumarill, Wigglytuff, Golispod and Jumpluff all don’t want to see Melmetal. And those are on many teams!
The meta to expect
So… if the India Qualifiers don’t make for an accurate representation, what are we actually going to expect?
Myself and other volunteers in my server have held practice tournaments and gathered data from 462 total teams. Competitors from all around the globe practice here, but the majority are usually battlers that are actually have a tournament to compete in soon – in this case, Stockholm.
I expect Shadow Drapion and Cradily to be the undisputed numbers one and two. I’ve seen more non-Shadow Drapion as well – perhaps for taking charged attacks from Cradily, Jumpluff and Lapras a little bit better. Clodsire is used as the main Cradily answer, with Primeape following up lower in the ranking. Clodsire more frequently packs Stone Edge now, to tackle opposing Golisopod and Talonflame. I think Pokémon like Lapras, Jumpluff, Talonflame, Golisopod and Primeape are here to stay, and Wigglytuff usage may drop a bit more.
Azumarill is still standing! With Clodsire running Stone Edge, it has decent play into many picks that are not Cradily (or Melmetal). Jumpluff usually has Aerial Ace and Acrobatics now, and in its Shadow form it doesn’t even really need Energy Ball to defeat Azumarill in the 1 and 2 shield scenario.
Other picks we are likely going to see are Serperior, Sableye, Galarian Weezing and Blastoise. Ground-type Pokémon are not as common currently, but I do think they may still see some viability in Gastrodon, Claydol and Shadow Marowak. Diggersby and Mandibuzz usage are dropping continuously as they just don’t pair well into most of the top meta now. Galarian Corsola is out, Dusclops I think was viable for a one-off meta tournament like we had in Vancouver and I think Sableye and Jellicent are the prime Ghost-type attackers to bring (if at all).
Of course, it’s possible that a Pokémon I’ve not described may win Stockholm. I believe the latest meta shift does open up options for many other Pokémon we haven’t seen much before, as the top dogs Drapion and especially Cradily just don’t shut down most hard counters. They have a lot of wins, but Shadow Drapion is fragile and Cradily relies on debuffs to overcome neutral matchups.
Players to look out for
At the time of writing, Stockholm is counting 71 competitors – that’s almost 30 less than last season! Besides EUIC, the numbers in Europe haven’t been that hot this season.
This does mean it’s going to be a stacked field. And we have competitors from all over Europe! We start off with a local cuisine, as this Stockholm resident is impossible to miss.
This man lives for the 50/50 chances, because how else are you such a fan of Leaf Tornado Serperior. Galaxkobolten is the 2024 Lille Regional Champion and has 4 medals in total to his name. He brought Serperior to his last 5 tournaments, and it has always been with Leaf Tornado – even with Pokémon like Jumpluff, Talonflame and Drapion around!
His record is a 50/50 though, with some mediocre performances and some very good ones. If we talk about more consistent players, I think PvpDavid makes for an excellent name.
He top cut 3 times in 7 masters division tournaments played (as his first few were in the Seniors division). From my personal experience with him, he went from full copium chatting after losing a battle, to gigachad calm and relaxed ‘TomahawkUK, I don’t have time to make a team, you make me one and I’ll hit gold with it’ champion. I don’t mind seeing David take another medal and grow further becoming Europe’s best.
Moving away from Sweden, let’s highlight some Spanish-speaking battlers. P4T0M4N is the 2025 EUIC Champion, and his season has been… interesting. After a 1-2 at Worlds 2024 and a 4-2 at 2024 EUIC, I don’t think many players considered him as their first thought for a contender to win a big tournament – even if the answer to ‘Who is the best battler from Spain’ was likely to be either him or Paulasha97.
And then boom. Wins EUIC 2025. P4T0M4N instantly is back up there with the best of Europe, someone who could potentially win the World Championships too. It’s crazy how this goes.
I’m not saying I didn’t believe in P4T0M4N anymore after a few worse performances, or that I thought he lost his touch. We just have so many players at a similar high skill ceiling that it’s easy to forget about a player who can defeat anyone in their way. And now he is easily considered one of the best at this time again. Let’s see if he can keep up his EUIC form and take some more prizes home.
And then the final name I’ve noted is also a Spanish-speaking battler. But not from Spain! He is actually from Chile – it is Ventuski!
Ventuski has actually resorted to judging some of the events in South America rather than competing. The last tournament he played in was 2025 Bogotà, where he had 2-2 record. We know Ventuski from the grassroots formats and that he definitely had what it takes to take out the competition, but… does he still have his touch now? We’ll see how he matches up against the European competition.
Closing Words
And that was it for this week! Stockholm is the only Championship in Europe I won’t be at, so I’ll be watching from home and see if my predictions for both the meta and players are correct.
As always, you can find the link to the bracket and the broadcast here.
https://www.dracoviz.com/2025-stockholm
See you next time!!
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