I was recently converting my Notes app history of my Pokemon TCG into a Google Sheets to save off my results of the 2025 season and decided to do some statistics to see how I performed quantitatively. Before jumping into the numbers, I would say that I had above-average performances at the tournaments I went to.
Preface
To establish some terms I'll use for the rest of the vlogpost, there are 4 different types of Pokemon Trading Card Game (PTCG) tournaments that I participated in this year:
- GLC – Excluded from all of this analysis; see Lucas: 12 for GLC results
- League – A casual tournament with cheap buy-ins ($5) and low stakes, no Championship Points paid out
- Challenge – Higher stakes than a League; meant to be an way for newer players to start playing competitively. Medium buy-ins ($15) and few Championship Points awarded, with the champion receiving 15 points
- Cup – The highest level of competition for local stores. Higher buy-ins ($20-30) and more Championship Points awarded, with the champion receiving 50 points
There are larger tournaments, such as the Regional Championship that Nathan went to in Atlanta, but I didn't attend any in the 2025 season. These tournaments often have thousands of attendees, have cash prizing, provide instant invites to the World Championships to the champions, and reward a boatload of Championship Points to players who place highly.
Championship Points only have two real purposes – earning your way to the World Championships with ~700 points, or earning Ace Trainer status with ~200 points and earning a special 2025 promo card, Asian examples shown below. This will be the first year players in North America can earn this reward. Each tournament tier has a Best-Finish Limit (BFL) that restricts how many points can be earned by that tier. This means only your best 4 placements at Challenges and Cups count towards your season's Championship Point totals, limiting the points available from local tournaments to a total of 260 (200 from 4 Cup wins, 60 from 4 Challenge wins).
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| Promo card examples; 2025's featured Pokemon are TBD! |
The Numbers
An early caveat, I think I started playing in August of 2024, but the first tournament I wrote the results of is from 10/12/24. The rest of this post is going to be a Stat Dump. Lock in, there will be a test.
Decks
I played six different decks during the 2025 season and recorded a win with five of them. All of my Ancient Box games took place before I started recording data, but I did play one tournament with a Roaring Moon / Dudunsparce deck, which follows the same idea while being much weaker.. it was the only deck I did not record a tournament win with. Alas, it isn't very good and I was just fuddling around.
My second-least played deck was Terapagos. I played this deck to two tournaments, six months apart from each other, and took home the win both times. The first win came in a January 2025 Challenge with a measly 4 participants when the deck was at its peak. Two of the other three competitors were a Mother/Daughter combo where the daughter was probably ~10 years old. Not the win I'm most proud of. The second win came into a 16-player field at a casual League tournament with a deck list I hand crafted and worked on for a few months. For background, all Terapagos fell off the face of the earth after the rotation in ~April removed a lot of cards that made the deck work.
Next up is a result I was a little surprised at. Regidrago is my 4th most-played deck, coming in with 3 tournaments played. I really thought I got more tournaments out of this deck! My average finish was 4.3/23.3 and I won 1/3 tournaments, good for a 33% Win-rate. The win came in the largest tournament I attended, with 37 participants! I technically lost in the finals, but that's just because I conceded to my opponent so he could get the Championship Points and I could take home the play mat, all of the prizing I earned, and all of the prizing my opponent earned. Knowing better now, I don't even think this deal was legal.. but.. I'll take it. The other two tournaments were both League events where I went 2-2 and 3-1-2 (W-L-T) and ended up 7/12 and 5/21 respectively.
Gardevoir is my 3rd most-played deck. Ked may be locked in for this paragraph, but my performance with this deck was actually pretty disappointing. My average finish was 3.6/7.8. I was able to record two tournament wins with this deck, but they came in two Challenges with just 4 and 6 players. I wrote about this double-header in my second blog (wow! that seems so long ago to just be March!). Picking up Gardevoir was my first foray into evolution decks, slower decks (I had only played aggressive decks to this point), and into decks that are less linear. Playing Gardevoir definitely helped me to become a better, more well-rounded player, but the performances were lackluster.
My second most-played deck is Dragapult, the focus of my sixth blog. Over six tournaments, I averaged a finish of 7.8/18.0 with this deck, but that value is being spiked by the "low" mentioned in my seventh blog, where I placed 25/28 at a Challenge. Removing that Challenge, my average finish was 4.4/16.0, which feels more representative of the truth, considering I won three tournaments and earned prizing at a fourth with this deck. I also lost a win-and-in at a Cup with this deck to a game that still pisses me off, so I won't talk about that one. Obviously just removing a tournament is disingenuous, so we can go with the first numbers but just recognize that this deck treated me quite well 🙂
Last but not least is the second deck I ever played, Miraidon. This deck was in my back pocket all the way up until rotation, with the first tournament in this dataset coming on 10/12/24 and the last coming on 3/30/25. It was also the subject of my first blog! I took this deck to TWELVE tournaments. My average finish was 3.4/12.9, with just two tournament victories to show for it. I can pretty confidently chalk up that tournament win-rate (which may be low, but is still well above expectation) to two things– I was a worse player and this deck was very linear with almost no comeback potential. The lack of comeback potential doomed a lot of games to be losses where I'd otherwise be able to claw back with decks like Dragapult. Both wins came in the only two League tournaments I played with this deck, while I also played in 4 Cups and 6 Challenges.
Tournament Types
Looking at just Leagues my average finish was 3.0/14.0. Based on the average attendance of these Leagues, we can calculate my expected win-rate if I was a stone cold average player. My expected win-rate for Leagues was 7.1%, resulting in an expected win count of 0.4 on the season (based on the expected win-rate and the 5 League tournaments I attended). I won 3/5 of the tournaments I attended. giving me an actual win-rate of 60% and 2.6 Wins over Expectation (WoE). Fun fact: both of the Leagues I did not win, I was piloting Regidrago.
Next up is Challenges, where my average finish was 4.5/11.1 over 13 tournaments. Having worse placement makes sense when considering the opposition should be stronger with more $ and Championship Points on the line. Based on the attendance at these Challenges, I have an expected win-rate of 9.0% along with 1.2 expected wins over the duration of the season. I ended up with 4 wins in the 11 tournaments, good for a 30.8% win-rate and 2.8 WoE. With the difference between total tournaments played, it makes to create a new per-tournament efficiency metric, Wins over Expectation per Tournament (WoE/t). For Leagues, I had 0.53 WoE/t and for Challenges I had 0.22 WoE/t.
Finally, we have Cups, where I averaged a finish of 4.6/17.4 over 11 Cups. With the higher attendance count, my expected win-rate was 5.8% and just 0.6 expected wins. I ended up claiming Victory in 3 Cups, giving me a win-rate of 27.3%, 2.4 WoE, and 0.22 WoE/t. I also made top-cut, or the single elimination bracket, in 8/11 of the cups I attended.
Player Count
You may not have as many questions as I did, but I was curious.. How did player count affect these numbers? Dramatically. I split up the tournaments into four buckets; from 4-8 players, from 9-12 players, from 13-28 players, and 29+ players. In the first bucket, tournaments have only 3 rounds of Swiss. In the second, there are 4 rounds, 5 rounds in the 3rd bucket and 6 rounds in the 4th bucket. That means with each bucket, there is an extra round of Swiss to be played for all tournament types (Cups will still have a top-cut).
I played in 7 tournaments with 4-8 players (damn you, Small Melbourne Community), and I won 5 of them, good for a 71.4% tournament win-rate against a 20% expected win-rate. I recorded 3.6 WoE, translating to a WoE/t of 0.51. In these small fields, I was able to go 3-0 very often and secure quick tournament wins. The first few rounds you are more likely to play lower quality players, so this makes some sense.
There were 10 tournaments with 9-12 players, where the results were *not* ideal. In my opinion, 4 rounds of Swiss is the least forgiving format. Any loss takes you out of contention to win the tourney, and you have one extra game against a good opponent when compared to 3 rounds of Swiss. I only recorded 1 win out of 10 tournaments, resulting in 10% win-rate, 0.1 WoE, and 0.01 WoE/t. Meeting expectation isn't terrible, especially with a fairly small sample size.
A total of 9 tournaments had 13-28 players, giving me an expected win-rate of 5.7% and 0.5 expected wins. I blew this group out of the water with 3 wins! Resulting in a 33% win-rate, 2.5 WoE, and 0.28 WoE/t.
The final group had the smallest number of tournaments with just 3 having 29 or more players. I have an expected win-rate of 3.0% in this group with 0.1 expected wins. I was able to snag a win in a 37-player Cup, so I've got a 33% win-rate, 0.9 WoE, and 0.30 WoE/t for this bucket!
Conclusions
I ended the season with 222 Championship Points, earning Ace Trainer status and a special 2025 season promo card. Honestly, this was more of a fun exercise than anything to help me gain insight into my play. I focus most of my time in the PTCG aiming to improve, and the numbers do show increased tournament win-rates by month, but all of the samples are too small to really pass along anything that is interesting or consumable in this blog post. I hope you enjoyed my 2025 season roundup.
Epilogue
I lied folks. I just didn't want to look up my win data based on the tournament's date. I ran the numbers and they were just as I hoped, each quarter that I played saw measured improvement over the last.
Time of Year
As I said at some point, I started playing the game in June of last year, with my first physical deck being built in August. However, I only started tracking my tournament results starting in October. From October 2024 through the end of year, Q4 of 2024 for us working folks, I attended 8 tournaments and averaged a placement of 4.1/17.1. Based on the average player count of 17.1, I had an expected win-rate of 5.8%, and 0.5 expected wins. I performed fairly well, securing 2 wins. This gave me a tournament win-rate of 25%, resulting in 1.5 WoE, and 0.19 WoE/t.
The first quarter of 2025, or January through March, was my most active period of tournaments so far! I went to 13 tournaments total, including my entire Gardevoir phase and a bunch of Miraidon. My average placement was 3.1/10.1, giving me an expected win-rate of 9.9% and 1.3 total expected wins. I won 4 tournaments, for a win-rate of 30.8%, 2.7 WoE, and 0.21 WoE/t. Slight improvement over the first quarter, which is very promising considering this included me trying deck archetypes that I was very unfamiliar with.
For the final quarter of the 2025 season, April through June, I participated in 8 tournaments. My average placement was 6.5/17.1 (recall that Challenge I did terribly in). I had an expected win-rate of 5.8% and 0.5 expected wins. I cleaned up this quarter, with 4 wins. That gave me a 50% win-rate, 3.5 WoE, and 0.44 WoE/t. Pretty good way to close out the season, I'd say!
Across all 29 of the tournaments I participated in, my average finish was 4.3/14.0. I had an expected win-rate of 7.2% and was expected to win 2.1 tournaments. I was able to win 10, giving me a win-rate of 34.5%, 7.9 WoE, and 0.27 WoE/t. I've already started the 2026 season off hot and I am excited to continue growing as a player.
There is a better process to calculate the analytics and I'll think about that before I do another stat-dump. Don't dog me for now, though. I see the errors and don't want to replace all of the calculations. I grow as a player, I grow as a data scientist. This is life.
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