With in-person Pokemon events only becoming more and more popular, the logistics behind them have only gotten more and more complicated. Nowhere is that more obvious than with Pokemon’s 2025 North American International Championships, which returned to New Orleans this year to simplify that to some degree. It might be a case of suffering from success, but the company is dedicated to delivering the best physical experience with every iteration.
The 2025 Pokemon NAIC saw a handful of winners, out of thousands, emerge across a series of competitions, including video games and the trading card game. With how many players, spectators, and the like this wide-net event pulls, the NAIC recently had to make some changes to more strongly organize the numbers. Game Rant was able to sit down with TPCi director Chris Brown at the event, and he spoke about these changes and how they’ll affect the event moving forward.
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Pokemon NA International Championships 2025 Changes Explained
Qualification Changes
The most recent Pokemon NAIC was the subject of some interesting changes designed to improve the event’s logistics. One of the biggest changes in this regard has been qualification for Worlds following a regional. Players will now receive an invitation to Worlds based on their Championship Point Leader standing, as opposed to whether a player hits a certain point threshold. For the North America event, this has capped numbers out to about the top 75 (and numbers will vary in other regions).
This definitive cap has been a concern for some fans of competitive Pokemon, but Brown explained why the change was necessary. Even with these changes, there are almost 3000 players who qualified in the 2025 event, but the team is committed to watching how this impacts the overall scene. Ultimately, he explained what logistical requirements necessitated this sort of cutoff:
“The big thing we’ll be watching this show is how players react because now it’s a situation where your fate’s not fully in your hands because you don’t know how other people perform. You can’t hit this clear point bar to know you’re in. We know that’s an area players are worried about, but on our end, the goal is still to create the best Worlds experience for our players. We did also want to define what it meant to be a world-level player, and from this perspective, I think the world championships will be more competitive and of a higher quality and caliber—while still being very generous in terms of how many players are going to qualify.”
Brown spoke on the importance of casting a wide net concerning player attendance across Pokemon TCG Masters and Pokemon video games. He added that “I think we’re unique in that we’re very generous in how deep we go with the number of players that can qualify per age division, per market.” However, he also discussed how going for a heavily packed event has led to problems for TPCi in the past:
“We have to book the world championships years out—the space, the floor plans, even things like how many welcome kits somebody gets. One of our challenges at the point bar was we could not actually fully predict how many people would be there. Sometimes we weren’t setting our floor plans until five weeks before the show, and we had to really over-order things like our welcome kits to make sure that there was one for every player, which sometimes led to an incredible amount of waste. Those are the logistical details that the players don’t necessarily think about, but they’re why we sort of necessitated this change in the system too.”
It’s worth noting that the NA event has seen an expanding attendance base despite these changes, with around 5000 in-person attendees, about 3500 of whom were different types of competitive Pokemon player. Acceptance into Worlds will be tighter regardless, but it will be interesting to see if this tightening of TPCi’s belt will encompass the regional scene too.