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Official, sponsored competitive gameplay has returned to the Pokémon TCG as well as the franchise’s many video games . After two years of no events due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, The Pokémon Company International has now announced that the 2022 Pokémon World Championships is scheduled to take place August 18–21, 2022, at ExCeL in London.
The following details of this upcoming return of the competitive Pokémon TCG and more was announced on the official website, where TPCI posted:
Top Pokémon players will be invited to compete in the Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield video games, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Pokkén Tournament DX, Pokémon UNITE and Pokémon GO for the title of World Champion. The safety and well-being of our competitors, organizers, employees, local communities and partners continue to be our top priority. Information on our COVID-19 policy can be found here. To keep up-to-date with the latest information on the 2022 Pokémon World Championships and other Play! Pokémon events, please visit pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon.
It’ll be interesting seeing how this impacts Pokémon TCG prerelease events moving forward. As everything seems to be getting back to normal, the state of PLAY-sponsored prerelease events had made it so many hobby shops were selling Pokémon TCG Build & Battle kits not just to players entering into a competition but to collectors as well. This isn’t true of all tournament-official stores but with gameplay left unsanctioned, this was a major feature that many stores used to keep prerelease weekends as major attractions at their store. Perhaps by the time Sword & Shield – Astral Radiance gets its prerelease weekend in early May 2022, we will have a better answer on that specific question.
Until then, stay tuned to Bleeding Cool for all things Pokémon where we cover the latest on the franchise’s games including the main series and mobile spinoffs, the Pokémon TCG, and much more.
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