While the official Regional and International Championship circuit gets most of the attention, Victory Road has spent 2026 quietly running one of the biggest grassroots VGC platforms around: free, online, Regulation Set M-B "Challenge" tournaments open to anyone, with fields regularly topping 150 to 200-plus players. Three of them have wrapped up recently, and each one crowned a different Mega Evolution core.

Louis Markl won the June Challenge #2 out of a 174-player field, piloting a team built around Mega Floette. It's a less conventional Mega pick than most of the circuit's usual suspects, and the win helped put Floette's Fairy-type utility back on people's radar heading into July.

The July Challenge drew an even bigger field, 232 players, and Pedro Feitosa took it down with a Mega Delphox and Mega Staraptor pairing. Running two Mega Evolutions on the same team isn't legal in every ruleset Pokémon has used, but it's been fair game since Regulation Set M-A introduced Mega Evolution to Pokémon Champions, and results like Feitosa's are part of why double-Mega cores have become a real archetype rather than a gimmick.

Most recently, Michael Kelsch took his first Victory Road title at the August Challenge #2, beating Ecuador's Juan Lucin in the finals with a Mega Gengar team. Gengar's combination of Speed, a workable offensive typing, and access to Mega Evolution's stat and ability boost has made it one of the more consistent picks across the circuit all season, and Kelsch's run adds another data point to that trend.

For anyone digging into the metagame rather than just the headline, Victory Road publishes the full top-cut rosters for every Challenge, not just the winner's team, complete with exportable team codes. Here's the August Challenge #2 top 8:

1st - Michael Kelsch (Germany): Mega Gengar, Swampert, Incineroar, Sneasler, Alolan Ninetales, Dragonite.

2nd - Juan Lucin (Ecuador): Mega Raichu Y, Mega Aerodactyl, Basculegion, Kingambit, Sylveon, Sneasler.

3rd - Yosuke Takayanagi (Japan): Mega Raichu Y, Mega Staraptor, Basculegion, Farigiraf, Torkoal, Sneasler.

4th - Li Yu-Chi (Taiwan): Mega Charizard Y, Venusaur, Incineroar, Toxapex, Sylveon, Garchomp.

5th - Takumi Sakurai (Japan): Mega Dragonite, Mega Aerodactyl, Basculegion, Kingambit, Sylveon, Sneasler.

6th - William Brown (USA): Mega Charizard Y, Mega Swampert, Grimmsnarl, Venusaur, Pelipper, Archaludon.

7th - Alex Underhill (USA): Mega Charizard Y, Mega Swampert, Grimmsnarl, Venusaur, Pelipper, Archaludon.

8th - Juan Salerno (Argentina): Mega Charizard Y, Mega Floette, Basculegion, Kingambit, Whimsicott, Garchomp.

A few things jump out from that list. Sneasler and Basculegion each show up on half the top 8, reinforcing how central they've become to the format regardless of which Mega a team is built around. Places 6 and 7 also ran the exact same six Pokémon, a reminder that at this level, plenty of players are converging on the same core builds independently rather than copying each other outright.

Zoom out across all three results and the pattern is less about any single Pokémon and more about the format itself. Every Victory Road Challenge this season has run under Regulation Set M-B, the current Pokémon Champions ruleset, and Mega Evolution cores have won every single one of them, just with a different Mega anchoring the team each time. That mirrors what we've seen at the official Regional level too, where a similar mix of Mega-Evolution-backed offense and speed-control support keeps showing up in winning lists.

One more Victory Road event remains before the circuit's focus shifts: the season's final Challenge runs online August 15 and 16, free to enter, positioned as the last major grassroots stop before the 2026 Pokémon World Championships take over the conversation in San Francisco starting August 28. Expect a lot of players using it as a final tune-up before Worlds rosters lock in.

If any of these cores have you rethinking your own team, our damage calculator and team weakness coverage tool are both built to stress-test a Mega-based build before you commit a slot to it.