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.
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. This is only for Seville this weekend, and not for the Asia Championship Series!
There’s a lot to recap from last weekend, and Tinkaton will be allowed in the next Championships from now on!
Asia Championships & Monterrey recap
Okay so last weekend had even more action than I wrote about initially. The South Korea qualifiers were followed up by the playoffs in 2 weeks – and the results are exciting!
CharmingP0ri had won a grassroots tournament and immediately swept the South Korea qualifiers after. Now, they also swept the Playoffs! Just like MasterMihir295 for India, this puts CharmingP0ri immediately on the chart as a potential top candidate to get far at the World Championships.
But it’s not only CharmingP0ri who did well. The other 3 competitors in the top 4 of the playoffs qualified with them for the World Championships. Do you recognise number 4? That’s Sejun Park! Perhaps not a name that well known within Pokémon GO, but those who follow the bigger Pokémon scene know Sejun Park for winning 2014 VG Worlds with a Pachirisu, but also being a top player in all other games. Qualifying for Pokémon GO this weekend meant that Sejun Park has qualified in ALL 4 games for the World Championships – Unite, VG, TCG and GO!
Indonesia had their qualifiers this weekend, too. If I’m not mistaken, there were 128 registered competitors and the top 16 qualified for the playoffs. We don’t have a dracoviz graphic of this one just yet, but here are some remarkable results:
- RifqiAditya23 swept the qualifiers swiss by 7-0
- The cut off for the top 16 was a 5-2 based on opponents win %
- One of the best players in Indonesia, Thomceane, did NOT make it
These players made it to the playoffs last season, and did so again this season:
- YukiXCyz (2nd place)
- Minicokeee (3rd place)
- Yondathia (4th place)
- 0SirPanicalot (5th place)
- ARTSYYY99 (7th place)
- ZeyluzK (15th place)
If you want to see the full list for yourself, you can find it in the link here
But that’s not at all! The biggest Pokémon GO Regional Championship also took place this weekend, in Monterrey! Now, this was a bit scuffed though, because there were approximately 60-70 no shows. That’s… a lot. I don’t know why exactly – I’ve seen some rumours about people registering in GO because other games were sold out and they want the competitors kit regardless, but I recognised a lot of the names that no showed and those were mostly GO players.
Either way. That’s still a lot of people. The meta was… I don’t want to call it dull in any way, but there’s something unfortunate knowing Tinkaton will impact it the week after so you can just run the team from last week again.
The development at the tournament was also interesting. I heard the connection wasn’t too great initially, and the tournament host decided to have the cut off for day 2 at 64 competitors instead of the usual 8 to 16. I guess that’s possible when there’s no stream to delay the tournament for.
On day 2, I think the highlight of the tournament was TzSpenx knocking down everyone on his way to the gold medal. He wanted none of that American business, taking down even Reis2Occasion and NiteTimeClasher. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it being like Doonebug97 taken down by Sandodou and MEweedle at the 2024 EUIC.
Speaking of, Doonebug97 was also there. He lost to NiteTimeClasher on the winners side of the bracket and then won 11 battles in a row – including a 3-0 vs NiteTimeClasher in the losers finals. Even TzSpenx wasn’t able to stop him. Doonebug won the first best of 5 by 3-1, and swept the bracket reset by 3-0 to become the 2025 Monterrey Regional Champion. That’s number 5 for Doonebug!
The Taiwan qualifiers and Seville
So, like I said – Tinkaton will be allowed next weekend. With an amazing defensive typing and some good bulk to back it up even further, it can take on a lot of the meta. Even when it’s charged attacks are so so. It will be able to defeat so many Pokémon of the core meta; just to show a few here.
This is not a top 10 of a meta, this is an actual representation of Pokémon Tinkaton is able to defeat; some of them close, some of them pretty hard. With a high Defence, there’s a bulkpoint against Azumarill and Drapion as well making them solid wins.
But what secondary charged attack do you run?
I think both Heavy Slam and Bulldoze are absolute trash. While Bulldoze is a bit better coverage wise, it’s also a straight up bad attack (45 energy, 45 damage, no same type attack bonus). Heavy Slam at least has that same type attack bonus and a bit more damage, though Steel is hardly used offensively. It does help against Cradily, though. Just for that reason, I would lean into running Heavy Slam over Bulldoze. But that’s my opinion – perhaps there’s actual Bulldoze or even Flash Cannon tech. It’s definitely a Pokémon to watch out for, so we may see some more Ground-type Pokémon or even Talonflame.
I don’t know a lot about the competition in Taiwan – but the names standing out the most to me currently are vincent070400 and GamebirdTW. Both have qualified last season for the Taiwan playoffs and are currently very active playing in grassroots formats.
KimiSui227 is also a stand out name due to past success, but hasn’t been succesful in competition for a while now.
The top 16 from this tournament will qualify for the playoffs, and the top 4 from there qualifies for the World Championships in Anaheim.
The Championships in North America have had high numbers lately – higher than most of the Asia Championship Series. But I would not be surprised if Taiwan has higher numbers than Seville. Seville is sold out – but it’s a Special Championship. That means there’s no entry fee, so anyone can sign up. The unfortunate thing about that is that we’ll see some people miss out due to missing the short registration window because of silly people registering thinking they get CP from getting no shows without actually being there (by the way: you don’t get CP even if you get 6 no shows but you weren’t actually there so this is pointless to do).
El Clasico (Real Madrid vs FC Barcelona) in the Copa del Rey – The Spanish Cup finals – take place on Saturday evening, and for that reason it was quite expensive to book travels to Seville. My guess is that out of 128 registrations, approximately 80 to 90 actually show up.
Pretty small tournament compared to what we’ve seen the past couple months, but its the first one live streamed with Tinkaton action! I’ve noted down some names I expect to do well here.
This is what ArceusAurelius described as El Clasico in Pokémon GO, and I couldn’t agree more. The two most succesful Spanish battlers; P4T0M4N and Paulasha97. Both competitors tend to bring a flavour of hard meta and one or two meta breakers. We’ve seen Magnezone from Paula before, but also Golisopod and Walrein from Patoman. If they are once again succesful, they may define the new Tinkaton meta early on.
But there’s more! We have some ambitious Spanish competitors that have been gathering Championship Points all over Europe. StrangehToP reached top 17 at the World Championships last season and top 10 at Stockholm earlier in March so he has some form in him. Sanjudigo and MarcosShiny have had some semi decent performances this season as well and I think could be very good underdogs to make it far in a tournament on hometurf.
Closing Words
That’ll be it for this week! We’ll see if and how Tinkaton will impact the meta – I don’t expect a lot of changes in compositions per se, but it’s a force to be reckoned with.
As always you can find the link to the bracket and broadcast here.
https://www.dracoviz.com/2025-taiwan-qualifier
https://www.dracoviz.com/2025-monterrey
See you next time!!