The April 2026 rotation reset this format completely. Regulation Mark G left the pool, taking the entire first year of Scarlet & Violet with it — and with it Pokémon V, Radiant Pokémon, and the Lost Zone engines that had defined years of play. Marks H, I and J remain legal.
One number dominates everything else here: Dragapult sits at over a third of the entire tracked field. That is not a healthy spread — it is a format with one deck at the centre and everything else defined by how it answers that deck. The remaining share is split across a long tail of rogue and niche builds, none individually large enough to reshape the top table on their own.
The Favourite Actually Won
Worlds usually punishes the obvious pick. The 2024 title went to Iron Thorns ex, a deck almost nobody had on their radar, and that pattern of an unexpected champion has repeated often enough that the pre-event consensus openly expected it again.
It didn't happen. Andrew Hedrick took the Masters title piloting the format's most-played deck straight through the field — the frontrunner converting on the biggest stage rather than getting picked apart by the counter-strategies built to stop it.
Seniors went to Jake Ng; Juniors to Yuta Araki.
Dragapult ex
36.1%Phantom Dive is the attack the whole format is built around — damage to the active plus counters spread across the bench. Pair it with Dusknoir's ability to move those counters freely and you get knockouts that no single blocker can prevent. Drakloak provides the draw engine underneath.
Basic Box
12.1%The anti-Dragapult answer that finished runner-up at Worlds. Built entirely on Basic Pokémon, it sidesteps the evolution lines that spread damage punishes hardest, and Lillie's Clefairy ex gives it a fast, resilient attacker that doesn't fold to a single Phantom Dive.
Alakazam
9.0%A Psychic-type control shell that placed inside the Top 8 at Worlds. It trades raw speed for board manipulation, punishing decks that overcommit to the bench — which, in a Dragapult-heavy field, is most of them.
N's Zoroark
8.5%The N's Trainer line is the support engine that makes this work, filling part of the hand-disruption hole left when Iono rotated out. Zoroark's flexibility lets it adapt its attacker to the matchup rather than committing to one line.
Slowking
5.9%A grindier control option that reached 16th at Worlds. It aims to extend games past the point where aggressive decks run out of resources, then close from a position most opponents can no longer contest.
Mega Excadrill
4.6%One of the Mega ex attackers testing whether the three-Prize liability is worth the raw power. The Mega mechanic gives enormous HP and damage ceilings, but every knockout hands the opponent three Prizes — a maths problem the whole Mega category is still solving.
The Iono-Shaped Hole
The single biggest consequence of the rotation was not a lost attacker — it was losing Iono, the format's best hand-disruption Supporter. Without it, resetting an opponent's strong hand is genuinely harder, and the field has spread across partial replacements rather than settling on one: N from Journey Together, Marnie for shuffle-draw, Unfair Stamp as an ACE SPEC punish after a knockout, and various Team Rocket disruption pieces.
The second shift is Crispin, which has quietly become one of the format's most important Supporters. It accelerates Energy while enabling multi-type builds, letting decks cover more weaknesses than a single-type shell could — the reason toolbox archetypes like Mega Absol Tera Box became viable enough to win a major Japanese championship.
Dragapult is the safest floor in the format and costs about $40 to assemble. There is no cheaper path to competitive viability right now.
Basic Box took second at Worlds by refusing to give Phantom Dive good targets. Basics-only is the structural answer, not a tech card.
30th Celebration is not a competitive set, but Delta Reign in November brings Mega Rayquaza ex — the next real chance for the top table to move.
The competitive market and the collector market are barely the same hobby right now. A World Championship deck costs about $40. Single vintage cards in the same month moved by more than that in pure appreciation. Here's where the money actually went in August 2026.
What's Driving These Moves
Three distinct forces are visible in that data, and telling them apart matters more than the raw percentages.
Anniversary spillover. The Poké Ball promo climbing is not about the card — it originally came from the 25th Anniversary Celebrations Ultra-Premium Collection, and with 30th Celebration approaching, everything from previous anniversary products came back into view. Lugia BREAK spiked on nothing more than a rumour that Greninja BREAK might appear in the Classic Collection reprints. That is speculation on an unconfirmed reprint list, which is exactly the kind of move that reverses when the actual list is published.
Supply shocks, not demand. Several of these are buyouts rather than genuine collector interest. One buyer took five copies of the McDonald's Eevee on a single day and the price jumped overnight — with four listings left, the last month saw sales anywhere from $24 to $139. A price with that spread isn't a valuation, it's an absence of sellers. The Sabrina Gym Badge is a slower version of the same story: a buyout back in November 2025 thinned the listings permanently, so ordinary demand now pushes the price up much faster than it used to.
Vintage doing what vintage does. The genuinely durable trend is the least dramatic one. Base Set Charizard, Southern Islands Mew, and Burning Shadows Charizard GX all climbed on low, steady sales volume rather than any event. While modern chase cards have retraced over recent months, vintage has held or grown — and the Gengar & Mimikyu-GX alternate art has now been climbing consistently since late 2024, from around $320 to well over $1,700.
A price spike on four remaining listings tells you about supply, not value. Look at how many copies exist before treating a number as real.
Lugia BREAK moved on an unconfirmed reprint rumour. When the 30th Celebration Classic Collection list is fully public, that premium resolves one way or the other.
The Sparkling Crystal that jumped is one specific numbered version. A visually near-identical print from a different Prize Pack series sits around $5.
