Pokémon Team Masters 2027 Seoul: 3-Player Teams, Entry by Oct 23

On September 28, 2026, the Japanese Pokémon Card Game site announced a brand-new tournament series, and the first stop is not in Japan. Pokémon Team Masters 2027 in SEOUL is a free, three-player team event at KINTEX on January 23–24, 2027, open to players from any country, and Japanese-language cards are legal. Applications close October 23 at 12:00 Korea time, which is also noon in Tokyo. Here is what that means if your cards come from Japan and your team does not live in Korea.

Header image: official key visual. Official image © The Pokémon Company (from the linked official page).

Can players outside Korea enter Pokémon Team Masters?

Yes. The official Team Masters Floor Rules say anyone from any region or country can participate, and a team can mix players from different countries.

That is unusually direct. Japan’s own Champions League documents never state a residency rule either way, which is why our Championship Series 2027 season guide had to reason around the gap. Team Masters writes it down. The only exclusions listed are people serving an active event suspension from The Pokémon Company or a subsidiary, people who have (or in the past year had) access to unreleased product information and anyone affiliated with them, and a catch-all for anyone the organizer deems ineligible.

The announcement ran the same day in Japanese and in Korean, with identical event data. The detail lives on the dedicated site, Pokémon Team Masters Web, which published four notices on launch day: the event overview, the prizes, the bag and ID checks, and a Team Masters edition of the Floor Rules.

How do you apply, and what does it cost?

Entry is free, and the whole process runs through one website. Every teammate needs an account, and only the Team Leader can submit the application.

The official overview lists the steps in this order:

The fee line in the official summary says “None”, and that holds for everyone on the team. What you actually pay for is getting three people to Goyang, just north-west of Seoul, for a January weekend, and the deck. The organizer’s disclaimer is worth reading before you book anything: it says it may not be held responsible for travel or accommodation costs if the event is cancelled or postponed, even when the cause is on the organizer’s side. There is also an optional Welcome Kit (a bag and other items) that competitors will be able to buy, with the price not yet published.

One practical note for readers in Japan: the application deadline is written as UTC+9, and Korea and Japan share that offset. Noon on October 23 in Seoul is noon in Tokyo.

Which cards are legal, and can you use Japanese cards?

Japanese cards are legal, but a Japanese deck must be 100% Japanese. English is the only language that can be mixed with another, and never with Japanese.

The format is Standard, 60-card decks, 6 Prize cards, with regulation marks H, I and J legal. That matches the current Japanese Standard rotation; if you are not sure where to find the mark, our guide to Japanese card codes and regulation marks shows the corner to check. Signed cards are not usable as a general rule, and a card list is due later.

The language rule, quoted in both the overview and the Floor Rules, has three parts:

• Players can use cards in any one of the seven usable languages.
• Players can mix English cards with cards in one other language, but not two non-English languages.
• Japanese cards cannot be mixed with cards of any other language.

This is the opposite of the problem Japanese events create. At a Champions League in Japan only Japanese-language cards are legal, which is covered in our Japanese tournament entry requirements guide. In Seoul, Japanese is one option out of seven, and each player picks a language individually. A team can have one Japanese deck and two English ones.

The team rules that change deckbuilding

Each team registers three decks, one per player, and no Pokémon name can appear in more than one of them.

The Floor Rules give the example directly: if Player A runs one Pikachu ex, Players B and C cannot run any Pikachu ex, including versions with different attacks or HP. They could still run plain Pikachu, because Pikachu and Pikachu ex count as different names. Trainer and Energy cards are not restricted across the team. For Japanese-card players this is the real shopping constraint: the three of you have to agree who plays which attacker before anyone orders.

A few more team-only rules:

• Players sit in a pre-registered seating order and cannot swap positions or decks during the event.
• Teammates cannot use the same card sleeves as each other.
• A team wins a round when at least two of its three players win. Matches are 30 minutes, and an unfinished match counts as a loss for both players in the Swiss rounds.

How the two days run, and where Worlds fits

Day 1 is up to seven Swiss rounds, and teams with at least five wins advance. The top 4 teams at the end of Day 2 earn invites to the 2027 World Championships.

On Sunday, advancing teams keep their scores and play up to three more Swiss rounds. The top 16 teams then play a single-elimination bracket, best-of-one per player, to decide the champion. Swiss ties are broken by match points, then total individual wins, then opponents’ win percentage.

The prize ladder, per the official prizes page:

The prizes page does not say how the top-4 invites work per player inside a team, or how they sit next to other qualification routes. Treat that as unpublished for now. For a Japan-based Master League player, the other path to the same event is a Champions League 2027 finish, where the berth is now the Master League top 8. The two routes differ in almost every way that matters to an overseas reader: Champions League requires Japanese-language cards only and runs in Japanese, while Team Masters takes seven languages and tells players who don’t share a language to use gestures and call a judge.

What to pack for check-in

Bring your passport. It is the ID the official notice asks for, and it is the only option listed that works for a non-Korean visitor.

The identity-check notice allows three South Korean government documents as alternatives (Resident Registration Certificate, driver’s license, Youth ID Card), and none of those apply to most readers. Bags are inspected at the entrance and again on re-entry.

Players under 19 may bring up to two guardians aged 19 or older, and the organizer says it will send guardian access details to selected participants later. Check-in on Saturday runs 8:00 to 9:30, and a team not checked in on time takes a Round 1 loss.

The official promotion video went up alongside the announcement:

What is still unpublished

Four things were not on any official page as of September 30, and we are not going to guess at them:

• How the Worlds invites are allocated within a top-4 team, and how they interact with other qualification paths.
• The card list that the overview says will be published later.
• When deck registration opens. Only the January 23, 07:00 deadline is set.
• The Welcome Kit’s contents and price.

All four should appear on the News page of Pokémon Team Masters Web, which is where the original four notices were posted. The application window is what’s open now, and it closes October 23.