Pokémon dumps Oceania International Championships from 2024 circuit

Pokémon has announced that it has removed the Oceania International Championships from the 2024 Championship Series Season.

This means Pokémon VGC, TCG and Go players within Australia and New Zealand will have a more challenging time trying to quality for Worlds.

Regional events, which will continue, give fewer qualification points than Internationals. Players may have to travel to other countries to get close now. Currently, only three Regional events are announced for Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

This is the statement from Pokemon;

The International Championships were introduced in the 2017 season and were designed around the sizes of our four major rating zones at the time: Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania. Following the restructuring of the Oceania rating zone in 2020, that region was split into two smaller rating zones: Asia-Pacific and the newly defined Oceania rating zone. Since then, we have been assessing how we can best serve our global player base, and we have made the difficult decision to remove the Oceania International Championships from our circuit.

We will continue to support this rating zone with Regional Championships (stay tuned for details), and players from this rating zone are still eligible to earn travel support to other International Championships and Worlds. 

This is unfortunate to see, and we’ll simply see less Aussie and New Zealander players at the top levels now.