Pokémon TCG Frankfurt & Brisbane Regionals 2026 Results

Twenty-six players registered Alakazam/Dusknoir for the Frankfurt Regional Championships. Two of them played the final. Tomasz Chałupka beat Mateusz Łaszkiewicz in an Alakazam/Dusknoir mirror to close out a 2,793-player Masters Division on September 26-27, 2026, in a field where that archetype was 0.93% of the room, per Limitless Labs' metagame breakdown. The same weekend in Australia, the Brisbane Regional went the other way entirely: Dragapult ex, the format's most-played deck, took first, second and third, seven days after it failed to win Baltimore from 30% of the field.

There is a second reason this weekend matters. Per The Pokémon Company's TCG Live release notice, cards from Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration "are legal for Play! Pokémon tournament play as of September 25, 2026." That is the second Friday after the set's September 16 street date, which is exactly the timing section 4.1.2 of the TCG Tournament Handbook prescribes for new cards. Baltimore ran September 18-20, before that date. So Frankfurt and Brisbane were the first two Regional Championships of the 2027 season played with the set legal, and the decklists now show where Mew ex actually went.

Every standing, record and decklist below comes from Limitless Labs, which builds its tables from the RK9 tournament software; the finals pairings and Top 8 order were cross-checked against RK9's own Frankfurt and Brisbane pages. Limitless notes its standings are calculated outside the official software, so treat a single record as close rather than certified. Records include top-cut matches.

Frankfurt: the 26-player deck that went first and second

Start with the size of the upset, because the numbers are the story. Alakazam/Dusknoir had 26 pilots in Frankfurt's Masters Division. Eight of them made Day 2, a 30.8% conversion rate against 18.2% for the field as a whole (508 of 2,793). Its win rate on Limitless was 56.00% - the highest of the 26 named archetypes that had 20 or more pilots. (Limitless scores a tie as a third of a win: 133 wins, 96 losses and 21 ties works out to exactly 56.00% that way.)

Then the top of the bracket. Chałupka finished 16-1-1 and Łaszkiewicz 14-3-1, both from Poland, and they registered the identical 60 cards - same counts, same printings, card for card on their Limitless decklist pages.

Łaszkiewicz is not a newcomer to the deck. Limitless Labs has him 7th at the 2026 World Championships on the same archetype, and his Worlds list shares 58 of its 60 cards with the Frankfurt one: the Worlds version ran a fourth Gwynn and a Patrat where Frankfurt ran two more Dawn. Limitless's tournament database also lists him as the winner of the Prague Regional in April 2026. A player who top-8s Worlds with a deck and then brings it to the next big European event is not a surprise pick. The surprise is that almost nobody else did.

How Alakazam and Dusknoir actually take Prizes

Read the card text and the deck explains itself. Card text here is from the Pokémon TCG API.

• Alakazam's Powerful Hand costs one Psychic Energy and reads: "Place 2 damage counters on your opponent's Active Pokémon for each card in your hand." Every card in hand is 20 more damage-equivalent. Hold ten cards and that is 20 counters.
• Kadabra and Alakazam both carry Psychic Draw, which fires when you play them from your hand to evolve: Kadabra draws 2, Alakazam draws 3. The evolution line refills the hand that powers the attack.
• Strange Timepiece devolves one of your evolved Psychic Pokémon by putting its Evolution cards back into your hand. Those cards count toward Powerful Hand, and they are a Kadabra and an Alakazam you can evolve with again to re-trigger Psychic Draw (not that turn - the card forbids it).
• Dusclops and Dusknoir carry Cursed Blast: once during your turn, put 5 (Dusclops) or 13 (Dusknoir) damage counters on any of your opponent's Pokémon, Active or Benched, and the Pokémon using it is Knocked Out. That is a finisher that reaches anywhere on the board, paid for with a one-Prize body.

Both of those damage sources place counters rather than dealing damage, which matters more than it sounds. Page 20 of The Pokémon Company's 2026 Web Rulebook is explicit that "damage counters aren't affected by Weakness, Resistance, or any other effects on a Pokémon." Our Bench Rules guide goes through which protection cards that wording slips past.

Here is the winning list, from Chałupka's decklist page on Limitless Labs:

Pokémon - 23

Trainers - 32

Energy - 5

Five Energy is the number to stare at. It sits below even the 6-9 our deck-building guide suggests for one- and two-Energy attackers, and it works because Powerful Hand needs exactly one Psychic, while Telepathic Psychic Energy searches out up to 2 Basic Psychic Pokémon onto the Bench when you attach it to a Psychic Pokémon - Abra and Duskull both qualify. Apart from a single Boss's Orders, the Supporter line is all search and draw: Hilda fetches an Evolution Pokémon and an Energy, Dawn fetches a Basic, a Stage 1 and a Stage 2, and Gwynn discards up to two non-Rule Box Pokémon to draw three cards for each. Four Rare Candy cover the Stage 2 skips - our evolution guide covers what Candy can and cannot skip.

The Frankfurt Top 8

Cross-checked against RK9's final standings order:

Dragapult was still the room's biggest deck. The pure build had 427 pilots (15.29%), and with its Dusknoir and Blaziken ex hybrids the three builds our Dragapult ex guide describes added up to 739 players - 26.5% of the field. That produced three of the Top 8 and six of the 16-player top cut. Solid, not dominant.

The other deck worth your attention is Festival Lead. Dipplin's Ability of that name reads: "If Festival Grounds is in play, this Pokémon may use an attack it has twice," and if the first attack Knocks Out the opponent's Active Pokémon, the second goes into the replacement. In Frankfurt it had 111 pilots, a 53.02% win rate (second only to Alakazam/Dusknoir among the 26 named archetypes with 20-plus pilots), a 28.8% Day 2 conversion, and two players in the top cut, Duclos at 3rd and Alessandro Cremascoli at 9th. The same archetype ran 43.88% on 32 pilots in Brisbane, which is a useful reminder that one weekend's win rate travels badly.

Brisbane: Dragapult ex takes the top three

Brisbane's Masters Division was 817 players, and it produced the result Baltimore did not. Edmund Khoo of Singapore won at 14-2-0 with Dragapult ex, beating Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi's Dragapult ex in the final, and Brent Tonisson took 3rd with a third copy of the deck. Tonisson also finished 3rd at the 2026 World Championships on Dragapult ex, per Limitless Labs' Worlds standings.

Six of the eight are a Dragapult build. The pure deck had 125 pilots (15.32% of the field), a 54.59% win rate - the best of the 12 Brisbane archetypes with 20 or more pilots - and put 38 of its 125 into Day 2, a 30.4% conversion. Brisbane's asymmetrical top cut took nine players; the ninth, Jamison Bulloch, was on Basic Box.

Khoo's list is barely a departure from the one that won Worlds. Compared against Andrew Hedrick's Worlds decklist on Limitless Labs, 58 of Khoo's 60 cards are the same: he added a Moltres and a Judge, and cut one Special Red Card and one Basic Darkness Energy. Four Crushing Hammer, two Risky Ruins, the Munkidori and Budew package - all intact. If you want Hedrick's full 60 and the three ways the deck gets built, our Dragapult ex guide has it.

Mew ex's first Regional weekend

This is the question the new set brought with it. Mew ex's Memory Helix Ability reads: "This Pokémon can use the attacks of any of your Benched Pokémon," with the Energy still required. Our Dragapult ex guide flagged it as a possible Dragapult answer back when it had no tournament results. It has some now.

Frankfurt: 54 of the 508 Day 2 decklists ran Mew ex (10.6%), 77 copies in total, and 36 of those 54 lists ran exactly one. Where it went:

The other 11 lists were spread across four more labels. Three of Frankfurt's 16 top-cut lists ran it: Malaca's Slowking at 6th (one copy), Niedziella's Lopunny/Dusknoir at 8th (two), and Thibault Petit's Lopunny/Dusknoir at 14th (one).

Brisbane: 9 of 148 Day 2 lists (6.1%), and none in the nine-player top cut; the best Mew ex finish was Shuto Kogawa's Clefairy/Ogerpon at 10th.

So the honest first read: Mew ex arrived as a one- or two-copy piece inside decks that already existed, not as a deck of its own - Limitless's archetype tables for both events contain no Mew ex archetype. The decks that picked it up were Slowking, Lopunny and Basic Box; Dragapult players mostly did not (one of the 151 Frankfurt Day 2 lists across every Dragapult build ran a copy). Whether it actually beats Dragapult is a question these tables cannot answer, because the metagame tables report results by archetype, not by which tech card a list happened to run. It is two events and 656 Day 2 lists, so this is a first read, not a verdict.

One smaller 30th Celebration card also turned up: Unown (072/128), whose Mysterious Signal attack takes one more Prize card if it Knocks Out the opponent's Pokémon. Fifteen Frankfurt Day 2 lists ran it, ten of them Slowking - a deck whose Seek Inspiration attack discards the top card of its deck and, if that card is a Pokémon without a Rule Box, uses one of its attacks.

Three Regionals in: the Dragapult scoreboard

Three events into the 2027 season, counting the same three builds everywhere (pure, Dusknoir, Blaziken ex) from each event's Limitless Labs metagame page:

Two of three Regionals went to something else, and the third went to Dragapult so completely it took the podium. Pick one row and you can argue anything - that the deck is being solved, or that it is still the best thing to register. The table says neither. It says Dragapult is a deck you should expect to face at every event - it has a build in all three Top 8s - and that at the two biggest fields so far, something else won.

What the finishes paid, and what's next

Per Play! Pokémon's Regional Championships page, 1st place at a Regional pays 350 Championship Points and 2nd pays 325, and each age division's champion gets a direct invitation to the 2027 World Championships regardless of their final point total. Chałupka and Khoo both have one. How the points add up across a season is in our Championship Points guide.

The field sizes also changed how deep each event paid, because every finish below 1st needs a minimum attendance in the division - the Kicker - before it pays at all:

A 300th-place finish was worth 45 CP in Frankfurt and nothing in Brisbane.

Next on Limitless's upcoming-tournament list: Recife on October 3 and Louisville, Kentucky on October 10, both with 30th Celebration legal. Until they run, Frankfurt and Brisbane are the only Regional-scale results with the new card pool.

Quick Action Checklist

• Frankfurt (2,793 Masters): Tomasz Chałupka won with Alakazam/Dusknoir, beating Mateusz Łaszkiewicz with the identical 60 in the final. Only 26 players registered the deck.
• Brisbane (817 Masters): Edmund Khoo won with Dragapult ex, which took 1st through 3rd. Six of the Top 8 were Dragapult builds.
• Alakazam/Dusknoir wins on damage counters, not damage. Powerful Hand counts your hand, Cursed Blast finishes from anywhere, and the list runs just five Energy.
• 30th Celebration has been tournament-legal since September 25, 2026, per The Pokémon Company's own notice. The Classic Collection subset is not legal.
• Mew ex made 54 of 508 Frankfurt Day 2 lists, mostly as a single copy in Slowking, Lopunny and Basic Box decks. Only one of 151 Day 2 Dragapult lists ran it.
• Dragapult is in every Top 8 so far and has won one of three Regionals. Prepare for it every round; do not assume it is the right deck to register.
• Next up: Recife (October 3) and Louisville (October 10).