Pokémon TCG Pocket has been hit with a wave of fan dissatisfaction over a plagiarism controversy stemming from missing Legendary Pokémon artwork.
Imagine you open a pack of Pokémon TCG cards, and one of the cards is unlike any other. Instead of featuring beautiful artwork of legendary creatures like Lugia and Ho-oh, a card would feature a placeholder stock image that says “New Art Coming Soon” instead. This is exactly what happened today with the release of the new Pokémon TCG Pocket expansion, Wisdom of Sea and Sky, as fans were saddened to see the two legendaries replaced by placeholder images.
According to a statement made by The Pokémon Company (and published by PokéBeach), the card artwork was lifted due to an error during production. The statement reads, “After internal review, we discovered that the card production team provided incorrect reference materials as official documents to the illustrator commissioned to create these cards. As a result, both cards have been replaced with a temporary placeholder that the team is actively working to replace with new artwork as soon as it’s ready.”
Fans would be quick to note that an ‘external’ review had already been done and made waves throughout the internet before the set’s official launch date. A fan artist, lanjiujiu, who published a Ho-oh drawing in 2021 posted to X (formerly Twitter), confused about the matching imagery. The post, which has received over 36 million views (and counting), shows the similarities between the images used by Pokémon TCG Pocket, and the original artwork.
Another verified fan, Lewtwo, made a post with a lenticular of the artwork used in the game, and the artwork published by the artist in 2021, and he said, “Entire perspective, wing shape and overall feather size are largely identical.” According to the official Pokémon Illustration Contest 2024 website, known artist Atsushi Furusawa has detailed the painstaking ordeal in creating Pokémon artwork, and he said “Pokémon TCG illustrations must go through supervision at the draft stage,” claiming there are multiple steps for each artwork to go through to become an actual card. It appears Pokémon TCG Pocket‘s digital cards may not go through the same process.
While The Pokémon Company’s statement shoulders the entire blame instead of leaving the allegations for the artist (known popular illustrator in Pokémon TCG Pocket, SIE NANAHARA) to deal with, fans will still be met with “New Art Coming Soon” instead of the cover Johto legendaries for now.
