Mice and a dream: How Maushold and a VGC newcomer earned 2025’s first Pokémon Worlds invite

The first major Pokémon event of the 2025 season just wrapped in Baltimore, and it ended with an epic final showdown between a VGC legend and a player attending his very first regional.

The Pokémon VGC community couldn’t have asked for a better start to the season with Baltimore Regionals (Sept. 14 to 15). The entire tournament was filled with new threats like Hisui’s Sneasler and Basculegion as well as weird off-meta picks like Scyther, Volbeat, and Toedscruel. To top it all off, we got to witness what caster Aaron “Cybertron” Zheng called “one of the most phenomenal runs [he’s] seen from a player in VGC history.”

The player is Nicholas Morales, who had never competed at a regional prior to Baltimore. With an incredible rain team of Pelipper, Archaludon, Maushold, Basculegion, Amoonguss, and Incineroar, Morales took his first Pokémon run all the way to the finals against one of the most accomplished VGC players in the world, Paul Chua.

In that finals match, it was Maushold who stole the show with two huge Population Bombs. First, the mouse family used a ten-hit Population Bomb on its ally Archaludon to give the latter six defensive Stamina boosts. From there, Archaludon was then able to tank so many hits while dishing out enough damage to secure the game.

Then, in the final bout of the series, Maushold took matters into its own hands and knocked out Chua’s Terastallized Dragonite on turn one. This paid off immensely for Morales since it removed a huge threat and Terastallization from Chua’s team right from the get-go. And ultimately, it led to Morales winning his first regional and earning the first invite to the 2025 World Championship.

“Nobody was talking about Population Bomb Maushold—the missing piece that completes the story,” Zheng commented as the event came to a close. Indeed, we got to see the rise of new ‘mons with a lot of creative teams finding success in this Reg H meta, but no one could have predicted three tiny mice would be the MVPs of the tournament. And that’s just further proof of how wild yet exciting this format is without any Legendary or Paradox Pokémon in the picture.

Who knows which Pokémon will next rise up at the next Reg H events before VGC shifts back to the previous Regulation G ruleset in January.