The 2024 Season TLDR
A compilation of all the announcements in one place
Hello readers, this in an unplanned extremely off-the-cuff article today, and it’s free for everyone. Why? The 2024 season just had its details announced, and I think having a breakdown of everything in written form will be helpful for people. I also want to share my thoughts on what everything TPCi has shared indicates for the season.
The Worlds Invite Structure
As you can see here, we have a largely increased threshold of Championship points in order to qualify for Worlds. This, by itself, is no surprise. We all expected the number to be higher than last season due to the presence of local events existing for the entire season. I don’t think many pope expected 600 for NA and 500 for Europe though. LATAM and Oceania appear to have had a more reasonable increase, likely to reflect their much lower number of events held.
No More Day 2 Worlds
As you can see in the picture, Worlds invites have been broken down into three tiers. For the duration of this section, I'm going to focus on NA numbers, as they’re what I'm most familiar with. Previously, the Top 16 players would receive an auto-invite to the second day of Worlds, which every other player would have the play through the LCQ, Day 1 of Worlds in order to enter. I don’t know what Worlds will look like without Day 2 invites, but it’ll likely be different than what we’ve ever seen at Worlds before.
Invites are broken up into tiers, with everyone who meets their respective point thresholds receiving a tier 3 invite, which is simply the Worlds invite. Tier 2 invites receive a travel stipend in addition to that invite. Based on previous stipends, I suspect this is Top 16/22/8/etc. Tier 1 invites get a Round 1 bye at Worlds in addition to the stipend. While that’s a massive step down from a Day 2 invite, it’s still valuable. I strongly suspect this tier will be extremely small. (EDIT: T16 Tier 3 and t22 Tier 2. Reading is hard.)
How to Earn an Invite
You have a few ways to do this in the upcoming season. First, you can meet the point requirements talked about above. The other way is to win a Regional, SPE, or make finals of an IC.
If you’re making the finals of an IC, you pretty much already have an invite, so that’s irrelevant. The Regional/SPE Champion receiving an auto-invite is significant though. If I win the first Regional of the season, I’ll have to seriously consider just not playing a ton of events in the remainder of the season. I suspect I wouldn’t be able to go cold turkey on events, but I’d at least be a lot more comfortable skipping the West Coast events. Notably, European SPE’s are the only ones to give an auto-invite.
The Regional Schedule
https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/pokemon-events/pokemon-tournaments/regional-championships/
Here’s the link to the full schedule, I’m just going to highlight the notable things here.
There are 12 NA Regionals, 3 less than in the last season.
There are 5 scheduled EU Regionals and 2 SPE.
There is 1 scheduled LATAM Regional and no SPE. This will almost certainly change later on.
There is nothing scheduled in Oceania. Good luck friends.
The Best Finish Limits for Events
There are League Challenges, League Cups, Regionals/SPEs, and Internationals. For the first three, the BFL is 6 in each category. That’s a change from the norm of 8 Cups and Challenges each, and the same number of Regionals that were allotted last season. Internationals have no BFL, as per usual.
You can receive a maximum of 390 Championship Points by winning Cups and Challenges, meaning an NA player will need to earn a minimum of 210 points at Regionals or ICs. Honestly, that doesn’t seem too difficult overall, but time will tell.
League Cups also have one small change in that instead of 24 players resulting in Top 8 points, it’s now 21 players that results in Top 8 points, meaning the dreaded 21-23 player Cups where you lose in Top 8 for zero points are a thing of the past.
What does this all mean?
There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Worlds will be smaller, and it’s very clear they want Worlds to be smaller. The highest points bar with the harshest BFLs we’ve ever seen leaves no room for debate on that point. Are invites impossible? By no means. Will they be more difficult than in recent memory? Yeah, definitely. Grind those locals and make your major events count, because you’re going to need every point you can find in order to get an invite.
Final Thoughts
I’m tentatively fine with these changes. Nothing sticks out to me as inherently bad, and I’m personally very excited that the Top 16 race isn’t a major thing anymore. Sure, stipends exist and are good, but they don’t provide a significant advantage towards winning the event. The bye does a bit, but not a ton when playing a lot of rounds at Worlds.
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