Side Events at Pokémon Milwaukee Regionals 2026

This regional is part of the 2025-2026 season, and is therefore being referred to as the 2026 Milwaukee Regionals (despite being held in October 2025). If you’re looking for information on the previous season’s Milwaukee Regionals held in May 2025, read this article.

Friday

As usual, I took the bus from the UW-Madison campus stop to Milwaukee’s intermodal station downtown. After dropping some things off at my hotel, I went over to the Baird Center to check in and play in side events for the afternoon. Unlike the previous Milwaukee Regionals in May, for this event they had us in the D and E halls on the third floor and as such we had to enter via the north entrance.

I registered for the Hard difficulty of the Pokémon Go Scavenger Hunt, then signed up for the Pokémon Puzzle League tournament. I wish I could tell you I did exceptionally well, but the reality is that I went 1-2, thanks to the skilled competition at the 8-person event. Granted, the typical issues of input lag and worn controllers meant that there were cases where some of my losses didn’t feel like they were my fault, but other participants had to deal with similar issues.

My second event for the afternoon was a TCG Raid. This went relatively smoothly (with far less waiting than what I experienced at Worlds in August), and as usual we were able to defeat the boss relatively easily. Events closed shortly after the raid concluded, so I headed back to the hotel and ordered a meal from the middle eastern restaurant Scheherazade.

Saturday

After donning the latest version of my “Ringo Starr as a Pokémon Trainer” costume (now with a Confined Hoopa plush), I headed over to participate in the Build-and-Battle. This used the “Destined Rivals” set (not to be confused with the anime season “Rival Destinies” from the 2010s), and I was dealt a combination of Misty’s and Team Rocket’s Pokémon. Misty’s Gyarados relies heavily on discarding her Pokémon from the top of the deck, so it seemed like a better idea to go with Team Rocket’s Tyranitar, especially since I literally got zero of Misty’s Pokémon in my packs. Using this setup, I was able to pull of an impressive 3-0 run.

After another TCG Raid, I decided to attempt an 8-person Ditto tournament. This was run using a single pack of cards to build a 20-card deck. Ironically, I did get a Misty’s Magikarp in the pack, which I had no intention of using, instead choosing Team Rocket’s Houndour and Grimer as my basics, and supplementing them with an assortment of Stage 1 cards, and a Stage 2 Annihilape. I was once again able to go 3-0 on this, using that Annihilape in the finals to clinch the win in the finals.

After this point, side events closed for the evening, so I ordered a Mexican omelet from the Omega Family Restaurant and watched the pivotal baseball game (as if there wasn’t enough happening in Milwaukee already this weekend).

Sunday

Having changed into my “Michael Hutchence as a Pokémon Trainer” cosplay (now with Rock Star Pikachu plush), I went to the center and waited for the start of the noon Chaos Cup event. In addition to having pre-made teams (one of which I had to re-enter because it mysteriously dropped off my list between rounds two and three), the judge would assign arbitrary additional rules to groups of players each round. Despite having lesser skills at the VGC than TCG, I was able to finish 2-1.

After turning in my Go Scavenger Hunt results, I participated in the afternoon’s TCG pocket event. I brought in my usual Greninja/Articuno EX and Serperior/Celebi EX decks, but only managed to attain a record of 1-2, and then only by virtue of getting a bye in the second round (which at least that gave me some time to take advantage of the Solosis Community Day in Go). I obviously have some work to do, and probably need to explore some new deck ideas.

Other Observations:

-If Gaming Generations wants to continue to hold retro gaming competitions, it really would be nice if they could upgrade their N64 and GameCube setups to improve the experience. The SNES/N64/GameCube combo adapters may be fine for Stadium and other turn-based games, but for Puzzle League/Challenge and Pinball, faster response times are needed. Games using the Game Boy Player were particularly laggy and difficult. Products like the Rad2x and adapters that use the GameCube digital port (allowing 480p on that system) are available for under $100. If they’re willing/allowed to mod the N64, it seems like there’s a new low-cost mod out there.
-In terms of time taken, there seemed to be far fewer delays at this event than there were at the May regional. I can’t speak personally as to whether they brought in more staff or had fewer attendees, but things ran much better from a time and organizational standpoint.

Side Events at Milwaukee Regionals 2025

As usual, I attended this year’s Pokémon Regionals in Milwaukee, WI, focusing on the side events available outside of the main competitions.

4-Person TCG Raid

At this point, TCG raids are pretty well-defined, though I did have fun with my Round-based deck and forcing the judge to figure out how Blaine’s Quiz Show should work in a format where supporters can be played on other participants. We were able to win both matches-despite me getting eliminated both times. It should be noted that my second match was slowed down a bit, because the judge had to divide his attention between two adjacent games (more on this later).

Build-and-Battle

Having missed out on the Journey Together prereleases (and with packs of the set difficult to find), this represented a great opportunity to finally pick up some of it. As far as the matches themselves, I went 4-2 across two events. In the first, I was 1-2, in part due to a low number of basic Pokémon in my deck (in hindsight, I should have included a Virizion from my packs to improve that number). The second try had me go 3-0, though part of that was due to an opponent that had to go to another event. Logistically, both events seemed to be slowed by communication issues (if possible, they should have used RK9 to distribute pairings).

Ditto Draft

This ended up being a pair of ones-and-dones, because the first of these was at the end of they day and only had two entrants, and the other because I flipped three tails using N’s Klingklang and didn’t get an energy on my last turn (on the bright side, getting knocked out gave me time to squeak into that second build-and-battle). Otherwise, these were pretty similar to other Ditto Drafts I’ve done, randomness and all.

Pokémon TCG Pocket

Obviously a relatively new event, the staff was clearly a bit fuzzy on certain aspects of this one. The registration forms didn’t have enough lines for the number of unique cards in a typical deck, and the instructions were unclear about whether you needed to write down just your Pokémon or also your trainers. In any event, I went 1-2 by virtue of a second-round bye, but I still had a good time, in part because this event seemed to go more quickly than others.

Pokémon Go Scavenger Hunt

After registering, I was instructed to select a set of tasks listed under one of three difficulties, with the higher difficulties awarding more points. As it turned out, however, the “medium” set of tasks were actually quite difficult due to requiring winning and capturing the Pokémon from a legendary raid, which was frustrated by the relatively low number of raids at the two gyms created for the event. I obviously don’t hold the Go event team responsible for that, but I’m sure they would have laid out the tasks differently had they known.

Overall

While I generally had a good time at side events, several issues were obvious. First, there were definitely fewer staff members than they would have liked (my understanding is that some staff invitations were sent out fairly late), contributing to considerable slowness in running events. Additionally, it appears there were a number of communication issues, partially related to the reservation system (OpenTable was being used, which I have seen at NAIC, but seems to be a recent addition at regionals).

Other Notes

-I continued my practice of cosplaying musicians as Pokémon trainers, adding a Ringo Starr costume to my repertoire. I got some looks, but also a lot of compliments.

-I had the honor of running into Cowboy Hat Caterpie, who was in fact wearing a cowboy hat in a Caterpie costume.

Pokemon TCG Midwest Regionals 2011: Magnezone

Here's an interview from last Saturday's regional TCG event:

Pokemon Regionals 2010: Long-Time Player

Here's an interview I did at the recent Pokemon TCG 2010 Midwest Regionals: