Worlds 2025 – Day 2: Warming Up On A Hot Summer Day

After getting tossed into the deep end on Day 1, Day 2 was my chance to find some balance… kinda like riding a bike, except the bike is 20 years old and the gears are all rusted up. It’s salvageable, I swear!

I spent the morning of Day 2 drifting between events, gathering photos and taking notes about each of the side events—which I covered in my Day 1 travelogue!—while I waited to see if some of my other plans would pan out. That said, some of my time was spent camped up at the Programming stage with my laptop, working on my site redesign; it was my way of channeling all the inspirational energy I could get while I was at Worlds.

But once I got that out of my system… now what? I was at the biggest Pokémon gaming event in the world… maybe I should actually start playing something? The only question was: what should I play?

A Tale of Side Events

So the Side Event section was HUGE. I mean, you can see on the map just how how many spaces were available for the various side events… and you can compare that with the Side Events that I was used to from 20+ years ago:

But not only was the Side Events are huge in-and-of-itself, but so were the list of events themselves! Based on the official list of Side Events for Worlds 2025 Anahiem, I counted 32 different unique side events! And that’s assuming I can actually count correctly:

And that’s just the unique events themselves… most of them had multiple events—many in 15 minute increments! Best of all, most of the events were US$10, which was a pretty good incentive to check them out.

Now I couldn’t choose all of them… if only because I didn’t have a any TCG Decks on me, didn’t have a Video Game or GO team, and only one semi-useful TCG Pocket deck. So I stuck with what I know best: Draft tournaments! It’s truly the great equalizer of formats. Having heard that the “VG/GO Booster Draft” tournaments were a bit wonky—apparently you got a pack of cards, and then had to hope you just happened to have caught any of the Pokémon in that pack in your game—I stuck with the “Ditto Booster Draft”, even though I never heard of it.

The Ditto Draft Experience

🎵 Purple Pokémon all around, don’t know if I’m coming up or down 🎶

Getting There

Now I’d never heard of a Ditto Draft before, but the the US$10 entry fee was the clue that something was different. Afterall, TCG drafts run something like $35 to cover the cost of six packs… so were we getting a dealer’s discount here? Six packs for $10?? Lol no, of course not… but as I would soon learn, $10 was actually a pretty solid value.

Signing up was pretty painless: everything was done on the Worlds 2025 website. You chose an event and time, paid for it online, and waited in line until your match came up. I figured signing up for the 2pm match at around 1:40pm would give me enough time… right?

It ended up taking a full hour just to get through the line! To be fair, that wasn’t on the event staff; they were handling everything smoothly and efficiently. Rather, it was just Saturday, the busiest day of Worlds, and everyone wanted to play. That said, once you were registered, you were guaranteed a spot, so the wait wasn’t wasted. At least it gave me an opportunity to hand out some of my custom cards to my line neighbors, so that’s a win for me!

Finally, I reached the front, got assigned to a pod with three other players, and we were off to the races.

How The Ditto Draft Worked

So as mentioned, this was my first Ditto Draft, and maybe it’s your first time hearing of it too. So let’s break it down:

For $10, you’re handed three booster packs, a special “Ditto” token card (see above), and placed into a pod of four players. From there, you play three short matches, one against each opponent. Depending on how many wins you rack up, you earn prize point cards that can be traded for merch (including more packs). So even unless you lose every match, you’ll get enough points for at least one booster pack… so all things considered, ten bucks for three packs minimum and more to come? Pretty good deal!

Here’s how the format works in a nutshell:

• Deck Building:
  • First step: use two of your three packs to build a 20-card deck (with two Prize cards), and you play with that for your 1st match.
  • After 1st match: add the third pack to make a 30-card deck (with three Prize cards); you then play with that for your 2nd and 3rd matches.
  • Note that in a normal draft, you’d get six packs to build a 40-card deck… so this one’s shorter, faster and friendlier for casual play.
• The Ditto Rule:
  • Each player gets a Ditto token card, which lets you evolve any Pokémon into any other.
  • A Basic Pokémon can evolve into any Stage 1 or Stage 2, and a Stage 1 can evolve into any Stage 2.
  • However, if you evolve straight from Basic to Stage 2, your turn ends.
  • You can only evolve once per turn; flip the Ditto token over to show you’ve used your evolution.
• Energy Simplified:
  • Because you’ll be playing with all kinds of different Pokémon cards, all Energy cards count as Rainbow Energy.
• Other Rules:
  • Standard TCG rules still apply. The only difference is the size and speed of the game. And be sure to congratulate your opponent for playing a good game!

Once I got the hang of things, I discovered that it’s quite the clever little system that makes limited play actually work with just a few packs, and it keeps things fun and unpredictable. Like, your may have a Basic Grass Pokémon that’s weak to your opponent’s Fire Pokémon… then BAM! you evolve it into a Stage 1 Water Pokémon to turn the tide! That said, it seems like the “mini draft” format (using only 2–3 packs and smaller decks) is unique to Worlds, where they’re trying to keep things moving with thousands of players.

Once our pod got settled and we all had a quick back and forth over the rules, we started to play one another. The matches were relaxed and friendly, exactly the kind of atmosphere that makes the Pokémon TCG so enjoyable for me. I only managed to win one of my three games, but I wasn’t there to rack up wins. I just wanted to play, hang out, and connect with other people who love this game as much as I do. And I guess the fact that the Pokémon franchise has fostered this energy within the community is what has kept Pokémon alive after all these years.

Here you can see the four of us from our pod, and our results sheet. As you can see we were pod #575, and assuming we were the 575th pod of the day, that means there were about 100 pods (400 people) playing every hour since 9am!

I probably would’ve played in other side events on Saturday, but I didn’t want to wait for another hour in line… besides, I had other plans!

Elite Fourum Meetup

Now some of you might have heard of a little website called “PokéBeach“, run by WaterPokemonMaster (Jon). We had planned ahead of time to finally meet up at Worlds, which felt like a bit of a family reunion… one between a proud older brother and his wildly more successful younger brother. I even did an interview with him back in the day. PokéBeach took off in ways I could only admire, and seeing how far it’s come has been awesome. Finally meeting up in person after all these years was definitely one of the highlight of the weekend.

After a quick chat, Jon mentioned he’d be heading to a meetup for members of the Elite Fourum over at the Hilton and invited me to come along. I wasn’t a member, but I figured, why not check it out? And I’m glad I did, because this was exactly what I needed.

There must’ve been close to a hundred people, a mix of community veterans, collectors, and newer fans. When Jon and I finally met—22 years in the making!—we hugged, chatted, and and caught up on old times. I gave him a set or two of my custom cards, and in return, he introduced me to as many people as he could. Before long, I was swapping stories with everyone about our collections, the stories behind my custom card designs, and slowly warming up those old community instincts which had laid dormant for so long. In fact, someone suggested that I turn my old stories into video shorts… and it’s not that I wasn’t planning on that, but rather, it was encouraging to know my “old man Pokémon tales” might still have an audience.

Another familiar name I finally got to run into was Pokumon, who brought in a stack of blank Trainer cards and was asking everyone to doodle their favor Pokémon on one. Naturally I had to add one to his collection; it took me a bit to choose a Pokémon, but I ended up drawing a Porygon2. Why? Well, Episode 19 of Dandadan had dropped and it was fresh in my head… and what other Pokémon uses (Moe Moe) Tri-Beam??

The meetup lasted maybe an hour and a half, but it felt like fifteen minutes. I could’ve easily spent another two hours chatting with everyone… but alas, the final minutes were announced with a mystery raffle drawing. When I walked in, I’d been given a small set of goodies that included a raffle ticket, but I didn’t think much of it… until my number was called! Huzzah! I walked away with a sealed Japanese pack of Moonlit Pursuit from 2007 (equivilant to Great Encounters), an entire booster box of Japanese Super Electric Breaker (equivilant to Surging Sparks) and a poster of Moltres and Candela commerating the meetup. Super cool!

We finally wrapped up the night with a large group photo; you can see me kneeling in the front with my blue Detroit Lions cap. Good times….!

Wrap Up Of Day 2

As I walked back to my hotel with my goodies, I was buzzing. Between the camaraderie of the Ditto Draft (suffering in line together builds character!) and the energy of the Elite Fourum meetup, things were starting to feel like how I remembered it. It brought back a lot of great memories of the past, but more like… it reminded me that I still have something worth sharing to people today. Best of all, it gave me a clearer idea of where I want to go with the site. Hopefully now I can hold myself to this goal!

(That wraps up Day 2! We still have Day 3 to go, where I go around on the Pin Rally and do more hanging out. Stay tuned!)