A competitive format is supposed to narrow as the season goes on. Players copy what wins, the field converges, and by the time you are a couple of weeks out from your own tournament you can usually name the three decks you have to beat. The last weekend of September did the opposite. Two Pokémon Regional Championships ran on the same two days, 26 and 27 September, on opposite sides of the world, and they agreed on almost nothing at the top.
If you are building toward the Pokémon League Cup we are running at Triad Wellington on Saturday 10 October, that is not bad news. It is the most useful thing the format could have handed you two weeks out.
Brisbane made up its mind. Frankfurt did not.
Brisbane drew 817 players, and its Masters top 8 reads like a format that had already settled. Edmund Khoo of Singapore won the event at 14-2-0 on Dragapult ex, and five of the seven players behind him were also on some version of Dragapult: Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi and Brent Tonisson on the straight ex build, Daigo Yoshihara pairing it with Dusknoir, Daniel Fray pairing it with Blaziken, and max kunde back on the ex list again. Only two decks in that entire top 8 were not Dragapult in some form, and they were Fletcher Cutting's Lopunny/Dusknoir and Masato Shimada's Lucario/Hariyama.
Frankfurt drew 2,793 players across the same two days and produced a picture you would struggle to recognise as the same game. Tomasz Chałupka of Poland won it at 16-1-1 on Alakazam/Dusknoir, with Mateusz Łaszkiewicz on the same archetype right behind him — and from third place down the top 8 simply fans out. Eliot Duclos brought Festival Lead, Alberto Conti had Dragapult/Dusknoir, Jonas Oertel had Dragapult/Blaziken, Tomás Malaca had Slowking, Owyn Kamerman had Dragapult ex, and Tobias Niedziella had Lopunny/Dusknoir. That is six distinct archetypes across eight slots, and the deck that owned Brisbane took only three of them.
Three decks showed up in both rooms
The interesting part is not the disagreement, though. It is what survived it. Three archetypes made both top 8s, and at almost identical placings: Dragapult/Dusknoir finished fourth in Brisbane and fourth in Frankfurt, Dragapult/Blaziken finished fifth in Brisbane and fifth in Frankfurt, and Lopunny/Dusknoir finished seventh in Brisbane and eighth in Frankfurt.
Two tournaments with no shared player base, more than three times the attendance at one than the other, and three decks landed in the same neighbourhood in both. Those are the builds with a genuine floor underneath them. They did not win either event, which is exactly the point — they converted a strong weekend into a deep finish in two very different rooms, rather than spiking once. If you only have time to test against three decks before the tenth, those are the three.
The card that quietly won the weekend
Nobody's tournament report is going to lead with Dusknoir, but it appeared in six of the sixteen top-8 slots across the two events, and it did it attached to three completely different partners: Dragapult, Lopunny and Alakazam. At Frankfurt it took first and second place in the same shell.
That matters for how you practise. When a card turns up across that many unrelated decks, it is not functioning as an archetype, it is functioning as a package — a piece you bolt onto whatever your main engine happens to be. So the thing to rehearse is not "how do I beat Alakazam." It is what your board looks like when damage starts getting moved around on it, because you are going to meet that effect regardless of what the deck across the table is called.
Do not read those two records side by side
It is tempting to look at 16-1-1 against 14-2-0 and conclude that the Frankfurt run was the more impressive one. Resist it. Frankfurt ran more than three times Brisbane's attendance, and a larger Swiss field means more rounds before anyone reaches a cut, so the winner simply has more games on the record. The two numbers are measuring different-length tournaments. What they tell you is that both players went nearly undefeated in their own room, and nothing more precise than that.
The attendance gap cuts the other way too. Brisbane's 817-player field converging hard on one deck and Frankfurt's 2,793-player field spreading across six are not contradictory results — a smaller, more regionally connected player base tends to share lists and settle on a consensus faster than a field several times its size drawing from a dozen countries. Our League Cup is a local field, which puts it closer to the Brisbane end of that scale than the Frankfurt one.
What this actually changes for the tenth
The honest takeaway is that there is no deck you are obliged to register. A fortnight before a League Cup, the format has just demonstrated at scale that several genuinely different strategies can take down a major event on the same weekend, which means your own comfort with a deck is worth more right now than chasing whatever placed highest in a country you do not live in. Play the thing you know cold.
What you should not do is walk in unprepared for the overlap. Expect Dragapult in some configuration, expect Dusknoir attached to something, and expect at least one player who read the Frankfurt results and brought Alakazam. Those are cheap predictions and they cost you nothing to test against.
Seats for the Pokémon League Cup at Triad Wellington on 10 October are up now on our site — you can grab one from the Pokémon League Cup ticket listing — and if you want something ready to sleeve up and start testing against this week rather than building from scratch, we keep the League Battle Deck [Mega Lucario ex] on the shelf as a sixty-card starting point. Either way, come practise here before the tenth. Play Bold. Collect Smart. Trade with Trust.
Tournament fields, final records and top-8 deck archetypes in this article come from Limitless TCG's published standings pages for Regional Championship Brisbane and Regional Championship Frankfurt, both held 26–27 September 2026, and the event date, time and venue come from Triad Cards & Gaming's own store listing for the 10 October League Cup.