Three in, one out: the 2027 World Class field, read on 2026 scores
World Class gains The Battalion and Gold, gets the Mandarins back and loses Genesis for 2027. On the one night all of them were judged together, the two promoted corps already out-scored two World Class members, and the returning Mandarins finished 7th the last two summers they marched. The piece maps where each lands and who gets pushed down.
World Class adds three corps for 2027 and drops one. The Battalion and Gold move up from Open Class. The Mandarins return after an absence. Genesis goes inactive for the season.
Every number below comes out of this site's own score archive. Nothing here is sourced to an announcement, and nothing here was reported by anybody else first.
The evidence
Mandarins finished 7th at DCI World Championship Finals in 2024 (92.150) and 2025 (92.825). (the DCI Forge score archive) Those two trips to Finals night landed in the same rank, 0.675 points apart on the scoresheet.
Genesis placed 21st, 22nd and 22nd at World Championship Semifinals from 2023 to 2025. (the DCI Forge score archive) Three summers, three finishes outside the top 20 at Semifinals, the round that sets position going into the final week.
At 2026 World Championship Prelims The Battalion were 20th on 80.600 and Gold 22nd on 79.425, against Seattle Cascades 21st on 79.738 and Genesis 23rd on 77.438. (DCI recap, 2026 World Championship Prelims)
The Battalion finished 3.162 points ahead of Genesis that night and 0.862 points behind Seattle Cascades, the World Class corps closest to them on the sheet. Gold finished 1.987 points ahead of Genesis and 0.313 points behind Seattle Cascades, the corps directly above Gold in the final column.
What the overlap shows
2026 Prelims is the only night this group of corps shared a sheet. Spartans, 19th on 81.125, are the nearest World Class seed left ahead of both incoming corps. Seattle Cascades, 21st on 79.738, sit between The Battalion and Gold rather than above both of them.
The Battalion outscored one of the two remaining World Class corps in that stretch of the sheet. Gold did not clear Seattle Cascades, but both incoming corps finished well clear of Genesis, the corps leaving the division.
The Mandarins' numbers come from different nights than the 2026 Prelims comparison above, a 7th place finish in 2024 and 2025 instead of a Prelims rank. The gap between that finish and where Genesis placed at Semifinals is the same gap this piece is tracking, the top of World Class against the bottom of it.
How the numbers are weighted
General Effect counts twice. The two effect captions carry 40 of the 100 points and the six performance captions carry 60, so a tenth moved in effect is worth two tenths moved in percussion. Every weighted figure in this piece is scaled that way; the unweighted caption marks are printed as the recap prints them.