Hot on the heels of the Pokemon 2024 World Championship, The Pokemon Company International has released new details about the 2025 VGC season, which includes online tournaments, new accessibility opportunities, and other big changes.
Competitive Pokemon has been difficult to get started with for several reasons. Alongside the difficulties of creating a team, players have to fund their own trips to official tournaments. That’s set to change, at least to some degree, in 2025.
These changes will bring a shift in how players go about qualifying for the VGC World Championship in 2025, in ways that are both more accessible and also more difficult. Here’s a rundown of the most impactful changes.
The 2025 VGC season is set to include more online tournaments
Online Global Challenge tournaments will return to the Pokemon VGC circuit, offering qualification points toward the World Championship.
In a move that will make it easier to play competitive Pokemon, the 2025 VGC season will include official online tournaments that contribute to qualification for the World Championship. This will help players who want to get into competitive Pokemon but are limited by travel distance, money, or disability which would make in-person events difficult.
To enter a grand or global challenge, all someone needs is a Pokemon Trainer Club account with an attached player ID that has opted into Play! Pokemon, as well as the Scarlet or Violet and a Switch to play it on. With the first grand challenge on its way, now’s as good a time as any to start building a team.
Global Challenges return to the Pokemon VGC calendar in 2025, with a new subset of Grand Challenges that are regionally split. One event will take place each month from September to May, spanning a couple of days. Championship points will be awarded to the top 1,024 players, ranging from 20 to 170. These tournaments have a combined best-finish limit of three. This means that the maximum amount of champion points one player can get from these online competitions is 510.
This would previously be enough to qualify for worlds during the 2024 VGC season, but the method of qualifying for worlds has changed to be based on total number of players in attendance and not a specific champion point cap. For example, there are 75 spots for North American players in the 2025 VGC masters division for the world championship.
On the unlikely chance that one player won three of the global or grand challenges, due to this change they would still likely need to compete in some in-person competitions to stay ahead. However, in terms of introducing new players otherwise daunted by the in-person requirements, this is a good move for the long-term health of the game.
2025 Pokemon World Championship will have a different format, qualification requirements
The 2025 Pokemon World Championship will change how the opening stage of the tournament work and other changes to qualifying.
Beyond the additional online challenges and CP system changes, the 2025 VGC season comes with a few other changes to the administration of Pokemon events.
In terms of qualification, regional and international championships now share a best-finish limit. This will make traveling to tournaments less advantageous. Offsetting this is that players who win VGC regionals or get top-four in international championships get a direct invitation to the 2025 Pokemon World Championship.
Alongside this, players who qualify for Worlds can no longer get round-one byes at worlds. The Swiss elimination style has been simplified to be more uniform based on the number of entrants. The full list of changes can be found on the Play! Pokemon website.
