Worlds, in San Francisco.
At the end of August, the best players on the planet sit down in one room for three days. We won't be there, and we have nobody inside to call the games while they happen. What we can do is read. The moment the official standings go up, we count what players actually put on the table, and we tell you what it changes for your own games.
The tournament hasn't started yet.
Doors open on 28 August 2026 and it finishes on 30 August 2026, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. That's 17 days away. Standings only go up once the rounds have been played, so there's nothing to count here yet. Come back that weekend: this page fills itself in, with nobody having to touch it.
The cards in San Francisco are the ones in your binder.
Worlds is played in Standard, which is the exact format of your Saturday league. Right now that means cards carrying one of the letters H, I, J, printed very small underneath the artwork. There are 1,951 of them altogether. So the deck that wins out there, you're allowed to put on a table at your local shop the next morning. In most sports you watch the champions from a distance. Here you get to play what they played.
Turn the card over before you buy it.
Of those 1,951 cards, 866 carry the letter H. It's the oldest one still allowed, so it's the one that drops at the next rotation, and that's 44% of the format gone at once. No date has been announced yet. But if a deck from Worlds catches your eye and you're planning to collect it, check that letter first: anything marked H isn't staying with you for long.
World Championships 2025
Riley McKay won this one, with Gardevoir.
127 places in the standings, and here are the decks that were in the bags. A deck showing up a lot mostly tells you plenty of people bet on it before they knew what they'd be facing. To find out whether it delivered, look at the column next to it: the best place it actually took.
| Deck | Players | Share | Best place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gholdengo | 38 | 30 % | 7th |
| Dragapult DusknoirWe cover this one | 21 | 17 % | 2nd |
| Raging Bolt Ogerpon | 16 | 13 % | 3rd |
| Gardevoir | 10 | 8 % | 1st |
| Dragapult | 6 | 5 % | 17th |
| Flareon Noctowl | 6 | 5 % | 57th |
| Charizard Pidgeot | 5 | 4 % | 4th |
| Grimmsnarl Froslass | 4 | 3 % | 41st |
| Joltik Box | 4 | 3 % | 50th |
| N's ZoroarkWe cover this one | 3 | 2 % | 6th |
| Dragapult Charizard | 3 | 2 % | 40th |
| Charizard Dragapult | 3 | 2 % | 75th |
You can't build these decks any more.
This edition was played before a rotation. Across the 24 lists we pulled back, our catalogue only recognises 64% of the cards, because it holds what's legal today and the rest have left the format since. So we'd rather not take these lists apart card by card: it would have you studying a deck you're no longer allowed to put on the table. The standings above still hold.
The same counting, on the World Championships behind us. It's the best way to see what a Worlds looks like once it's over.
- World Championships 2024 · 16 August 2024 · 1,147 players
The standings and the lists are the ones Limitless publishes for official tournaments, copied across untouched. The date and the venue come from the Moscone Center's own announcement. The count of legal cards is ours: we redo it on our catalogue every time it's updated, and this one is from 10 August 2026.
These pages are about the same corner of the game. If you came away from this one still wondering about something, start with one of them.