Pokémon TCG Recife Regional 2026: Results and Winning Deck

Two players registered Ogerpon/Meganium/Arboliva for the Recife Regional Championships. One of them dropped after six rounds at 2-4. The other, Victor Carreira, won the event: 14-2-1 through a 1,074-player Masters Division on October 3-4, 2026, closing with a 4-0 top cut in which three of his four opponents were on Dragapult ex, the last of them Fabrizio Inga Silva of Peru in the final.

Recife was the fourth Regional of the 2027 Championship Series season and the first in Latin America, after Baltimore, Brisbane and Frankfurt, per Limitless TCG's tournament list. The official event page puts it at the Centro de Convenções de Pernambuco, whose street address is in neighbouring Olinda. Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration was legal, as it has been since September 25 per The Pokémon Company's TCG Live release notice. The field was overwhelmingly local: 944 of the 1,074 Masters carried a Brazil tag in the standings, 78 Chile and 23 Argentina.

Every standing, record, archetype count and decklist below comes from Limitless Labs, which builds its tables from the RK9 tournament software, and Limitless shows a decklist for 1,072 of the 1,074 players. The final pairing and the top-cut order were cross-checked against RK9's Recife pairings page. Records include top-cut matches, and Limitless's win rates count a tie as a third of a win. Card text is from the Pokémon TCG API.

A two-player deck took the title

Limitless labels two of the 1,072 Recife lists Ogerpon/Meganium/Arboliva, 0.19% of the field. Between them they went 16-6-1. Here is how Carreira's half of that went, from his match history on Limitless Labs:

Count Day 1 in and he went 5-0 against Dragapult builds. One of his two losses came against the other way of building a Meganium deck: Manuel Vivanco's Ogerpon/Meganium/Hydrapple list, which finished 13th.

The Arboliva build was not new at Recife. Across the season's four Regionals, Limitless labels 32 players with it: 7 in Baltimore, 3 in Brisbane, 20 in Frankfurt and 2 in Recife. Before Carreira, its best finish was 71st in Frankfurt.

How Ogerpon, Meganium and Arboliva fit together

The deck is two Grass Stage 2 lines and a Basic attacker, held together by one Ability. Read the cards in this order and it explains itself.

• Meganium's Wild Growth. "Each Basic Grass Energy attached to all of your Pokémon provides GrassGrass Energy," and the effect does not stack. In practice it cuts the number of Energy cards every big attack in the list needs: two Basic Grass Energy pay for Teal Mask Ogerpon ex's three-Grass attack, Arboliva ex's three-Colorless attack and Meganium's own four-Energy Solar Beam. Japan's official Q&A applies the same doubling when a card counts Energy (in one ruling, three Basic Grass Energy count as six), though none of the Japanese rulings we found names Myriad Leaf Shower.
• Teal Mask Ogerpon ex. Its Teal Dance Ability attaches a Basic Grass Energy from your hand to itself once a turn and draws a card. That plus your normal attachment is two Energy in one turn, which under Wild Growth is enough to pay Myriad Leaf Shower: 30 damage, plus 30 more for each Energy attached to both Active Pokémon. It is also a Tera Pokémon, which matters twice below.
• Arboliva ex. Oil Salvo costs one Grass Energy: choose one of your opponent's Pokémon six times and do 20 damage each time, unaffected by Weakness or Resistance. That is 120 damage you can split across their board however you like. Aroma Shot does 160 for three Colorless.
• Forest of Vitality, three copies. "Each player's Grass Pokémon can evolve into Grass Pokémon during the turn they play those Pokémon, except during their first turn." It switches off the rule that a Pokémon cannot evolve on the turn it was played, the one our evolution guide calls summoning sickness, for every Grass line on both sides of the table. It does nothing for the Colorless Hoothoot.
• Noctowl. Its Jewel Seeker Ability searches out two Trainer cards when you evolve into it from your hand, but only if you have a Tera Pokémon in play. Ogerpon is the Tera Pokémon.
• Briar, one copy. Playable only when your opponent has exactly two Prize cards left, it takes one extra Prize if a Tera Pokémon's attack Knocks Out their Active Pokémon. Our Prize card guide has the rest of the threshold cards.

Now read Oil Salvo against the deck Carreira beat five times. It deals damage, not damage counters, so the Tera rule on a Benched Dragapult ex prevents all of it. That is the reverse of Dragapult's own Phantom Dive, whose counters go straight through Tera protection, as our Bench rules guide explains. What Oil Salvo can reach is the line underneath. Every pure Dragapult list at Recife ran the Ascended Heroes printings, where Dreepy has 70 HP and Drakloak 90, so 120 damage in 20-point pieces covers a Benched Dreepy in four picks or a Drakloak in five, with the rest going anywhere. That is card arithmetic, not a claim about how any of Carreira's games played out.

The winning 60

Carreira's list, from his decklist page on Limitless Labs:

Pokémon - 21

Trainers - 28

Energy - 11

Three things stand out. Both Stage 2 lines run 2-2-2 with no Rare Candy; the speed comes instead from Forest of Vitality and three copies of Dawn, which searches out a Basic, a Stage 1 and a Stage 2 at once. Every Energy card is a Basic Grass Energy, so all 11 are doubled by Wild Growth and all 11 are valid for Teal Dance, Bug Catching Set and Energy Switch. And the ACE SPEC is Unfair Stamp, paired with Fezandipiti ex, the same combination our ACE SPEC breakdown found in most Unfair Stamp lists.

Arboliva instead of Hydrapple

The more common way to build around Meganium and Ogerpon is the Hydrapple version, and Recife had 33 of those. Card by card, all 33 ran Celebi and the Applin, Dipplin and Hydrapple ex line; 30 ran Briar, 30 ran Unfair Stamp, and 27 ran both. Hydrapple ex is a 330 HP Stage 2 whose Ripening Charge Ability attaches a Basic Grass Energy from hand and heals 30, and whose Syrup Storm attack scales with the Grass Energy on all of your Pokémon.

Carreira kept the core that all 33 Hydrapple lists also ran (Teal Mask Ogerpon ex, Meganium, Bug Catching Set, Forest of Vitality, Lana's Aid) plus Briar and Unfair Stamp, which 30 of the 33 each ran, and swapped Celebi and the Hydrapple line for Arboliva ex and a Hoothoot-Noctowl line. The Hydrapple build put 6 of its 33 players into Day 2, the same 18.2% as the field as a whole.

It is also by far the more popular build. Limitless counts 226 Hydrapple-build players across the four Regionals against 32 on Arboliva, and Ben Dobberstein took the Hydrapple version to 2nd place in Baltimore, per our Baltimore recap. Recife makes it two Regional finals out of four with a Meganium deck in them, one in each build.

The Recife Top 9

Recife used a nine-player top cut. Cross-checked against RK9's final standings order:

Six archetypes in nine seats. Four of the nine are the pure Dragapult ex build, and three of those four lost to Carreira in the cut. Jose Santos's 8th place came from a deck only 12 players registered, Rocket's Honchkrow, which converted 4 of its 12 into Day 2.

Dragapult had its biggest share yet

These are the 14 archetypes with at least 25 players, per Limitless Labs' Recife metagame page. Share is of the 1,072 published lists; 195 of the 1,074 players made Day 2, 18.2% of the field.

Add the three main Dragapult builds together and they come to 353 of 1,074 players, 32.9% (Limitless files five more players under Dragapult/Dudunsparce), a larger share than at Baltimore (30.2%), Frankfurt (26.5%) or Brisbane (23.7%). The pure build converted to Day 2 at roughly the field rate and put four players in the top cut. The two hybrids did not: the Dusknoir version sent 6 of 60 to Day 2 and the Blaziken ex version 3 of 43, and neither made the cut. The three builds and how they differ are in our Dragapult ex deck guide.

N's Zoroark converted best

Of the decks with 25 or more players, N's Zoroark had both the highest win rate (53.16%) and the highest Day 2 rate: 31 of its 79 players, 39.2%, more than double the field's 18.2%. Marco Cifuentes of Chile took it to 4th.

That rate is out of line with the deck's earlier weekends. Using the same Limitless standings, N's Zoroark sent 45 of 243 players to Day 2 in Baltimore (18.5%), 13 of 54 in Brisbane (24.1%) and 42 of 188 in Frankfurt (22.3%). Seventy-nine players is a small sample, so treat Recife as one strong weekend rather than a trend. The next-best Day 2 rates among the 14 larger decks were Slowking (15 of 48, 31.3%) and Festival Lead (8 of 29, 27.6%).

Mew ex, three Regionals in

Recife was the third Regional with 30th Celebration legal, and Mew ex again showed up mostly as a single copy inside other decks. 12 of the 195 Day 2 lists ran it (6.2%), 17 copies in total, and nine of those twelve lists ran exactly one. Seven of the twelve were Slowking. Across the whole field, 69 of the 1,072 lists ran at least one copy.

The best Mew ex finish was Rafael Neto's Slowking at 7th, with one copy. Limitless files five players' decks under a Mew Box archetype, and two of them made Day 2. For comparison, our Frankfurt and Brisbane recap counted Mew ex in 54 of 508 Frankfurt Day 2 lists (10.6%) and 9 of 148 in Brisbane (6.1%), and both counts still match the decklists on Limitless.

Four Regionals in: the scoreboard

Counting the same three Dragapult builds (pure, Dusknoir, Blaziken ex) from each event's Limitless standings:

Dragapult has a build in all four Top 8s and has won one of the four events. The other three winners came from small corners of their fields: Basic Box was 5.16% of Baltimore, Alakazam/Dusknoir 26 of 2,793 players in Frankfurt, and Ogerpon/Meganium/Arboliva 2 of 1,072 lists in Recife. Four events is not enough to call that a pattern. It is enough to say that registering the most popular deck has not been the same thing as winning.

What it paid, and what is next

Per Play! Pokémon's Regional Championships page, 1st place pays 350 Championship Points, and the champion of each age division gets a direct invitation to the 2027 World Championships regardless of their final point total. How those points add up over a season is in our Championship Points guide.

Field size decided how deep the payout went. Every placement below 1st needs a minimum number of competitors in the division, the Kicker, before it pays:

Next on the calendar is the Louisville Regional Championships, October 9-11, and Limitless's upcoming-tournament list has Puebla, Mexico on October 24 as the next Latin American Regional. The next International is the Latin America International Championships in São Paulo, November 20-22, which opens on the day Mega Evolution—Delta Reign is due to become legal under the TCG Tournament Handbook's second-Friday rule. Our Delta Reign guide has the arithmetic. It also covers a Legendary Stadium from the Japanese set Storm Emeralda that has not been shown in English or confirmed for Delta Reign: 伝説の溶岩洞, which the guide translates as Legendary Lava Cave. On the Japanese card, it switches off every Ability on every Evolution Pokémon in play, on both sides. Meganium's Wild Growth and Noctowl's Jewel Seeker are both Abilities on Evolution Pokémon.

Quick Action Checklist

• Recife (1,074 Masters, October 3-4): Victor Carreira won with Ogerpon/Meganium/Arboliva, a deck only two players registered, going 14-2-1 and 4-0 in the top cut.
• Meganium's Wild Growth is the engine. Every Basic Grass Energy provides two Grass, so two cards pay for Ogerpon's, Arboliva's and Meganium's attacks.
• Oil Salvo is damage, not counters. It cannot touch a Benched Tera Pokémon such as Dragapult ex, but 120 damage in 20-point pieces reaches the Dreepy and Drakloak behind it.
• The three main Dragapult builds were 32.9% of Recife, their largest share at any of the four Regionals, and the pure build took four of nine top-cut seats. The Dusknoir and Blaziken ex hybrids took none.
• N's Zoroark put 39.2% of its players into Day 2, the best rate among decks with 25 or more players. One weekend, 79 players.
• Mew ex made 12 of 195 Day 2 lists, mostly as one copy in Slowking. Best finish: 7th.
• The win pays 350 Championship Points and a direct Worlds invitation. The 1,074-player field cleared the 1,025 Kicker, so 257th-512th earned 45 CP.