Pokemon is one of five games featured in Good Games' 2026 Championship Series, with a share of the combined $3,000 prize pool up for grabs across 20 participating stores nationally. Outside the Championship, Good Games runs a busy weekly Pokemon calendar too, standard constructed locals, weekly casual and competitive nights, and Learn to Play sessions aimed squarely at newer players who haven't picked up a deck before.
2026 is Pokemon's 30th anniversary
This year carries extra weight for Pokemon specifically. 2026 marks the franchise's 30th anniversary, and The Pokemon Company International has structured the celebration as a run of tie-in products across the whole year rather than a single release. The centrepiece, a dedicated 30th Celebration TCG set, is confirmed for mid-September 2026, and it's shaping up to be one of the year's most anticipated releases for collectors specifically. Anniversary sets tend to lean heavily into nostalgia and premium reprints, exactly the kind of product that draws in players who haven't bought a pack in years but still remember the original games fondly.
Closer to now, the Mega Evolution mechanic has been the throughline for 2026's regular releases. The Mega Greninja ex Premium Collection landed in early July, and Mega Evolution: Pitch Black, a full expansion built around six Mega Evolution Pokemon ex alongside a strong illustration rare lineup, follows in mid-July. First Partner Collection Series 3 rounds out the run in early August. It's a dense few weeks of releases even before the anniversary set arrives, and it means the competitive format has been shifting fairly quickly through the middle of the year.
A new crossover into competitive video game play
One thing worth flagging locally: Good Games has started running casual Pokemon VGC, that's the competitive video game format, not the card game, sessions in some stores alongside the usual TCG events. It's a small addition on paper, but it reflects something real. The broader Pokemon competitive community, video game and card game alike, is one ecosystem for a lot of players, and stores are starting to build events around that overlap rather than treating the two as entirely separate communities that happen to share a name and a mascot.
What this means if you're playing in the Championship
If you're building toward a Good Games Championship event, the Mega Evolution mechanic has reshaped a fair amount of the competitive Standard format this year, so check whether the deck you're bringing has kept pace with what's actually seeing play. Beyond deck performance, there's also the straightforward question of cost. Mega Evolution ex cards and strong illustration rares tend to hold real value, and buying into a competitive deck can get expensive fast if you're not checking prices first, particularly for cards that have just started seeing tournament play and haven't settled into a stable price yet.
C3's live Pokemon market tracks current AU pricing across recent sets, and Compare lets you check multiple sellers side by side before buying, useful if you're chasing a specific ex card that's seeing a lot of tournament play right now. If you're deciding whether to hold or sell cards from older sets ahead of the 30th anniversary release, the market page shows recent movers across the board, which can help pick the right moment rather than guessing.
New to the game
Good Games' Learn to Play sessions are specifically aimed at players who've never picked up a Pokemon deck before, a low-pressure way to get the basics down before jumping into a weekly locals night, let alone a Championship event. Staff generally walk new players through a full sample game rather than just explaining rules on paper, which tends to make the format click faster than reading a rulebook alone. With a 30th anniversary year in full swing and a wave of new product landing over the next few months, there's arguably no better time in recent memory to get started if you've been curious but never taken the plunge.
Where the Learn to Play sessions fit
Good Games Rockingham is one of the stores running these sessions regularly, alongside its full weekly Pokemon calendar of casual and competitive nights. Having a Learn to Play slot sitting alongside a full competitive schedule at the same store is a fairly deliberate structure, it gives a new player a clear path from their first game to actually entering a tournament, without needing to switch venues or communities partway through. For a franchise as recognisable as Pokemon, the barrier to trying the card game usually isn't interest, it's not knowing where to start, and a dedicated beginner session removes that barrier directly.
Looking ahead
Between the Mega Evolution expansion cycle, the 30th anniversary celebration building through the rest of the year, and the new VGC crossover events popping up locally, 2026 is shaping up to be one of the busier years for Pokemon in a while, on both the competitive and collecting side. We'll be keeping an eye on how the anniversary set lands when it releases in September, and whether it pulls in the kind of nostalgia-driven demand that anniversary products from other franchises have seen in the past.
This coverage is independent, C3 has no partnership or affiliate relationship with Good Games or The Pokemon Company, we're simply tracking what's happening in the Australian Pokemon scene and what it might mean for the cards you're playing or collecting.