The latest set for Pokémon TCG Pocket, Wisdom of Sea and Sky, was released today, adding hundreds of cards based on heavily requested Gen 2 Pokémon. Unfortunately, though, two of the star players are coming out in a not-so-ideal form: the 3-star cards for Ho-Oh EX and Lugia EX are launching with a placeholder “New Art Coming Soon” disclaimer following plagiarism accusations.
Yesterday, fan artist lanjiujiu posted a side-by-side comparison of a Ho-Oh commission they did in 2021 against the datamined card art for the 3-star Ho-Oh EX in TCG Pocket’s latest expansion, and the outlines for the two were a nearly 1:1 match. This caused many to assume that the new in-game Ho-Oh art was plagiarized by tracing lanjiujiu’s work.
In response, the Pokémon TCG Pocket team put out a statement this morning that apologized for the situation. They wrote there was “a production issue regarding the illustration of Ho-Oh featured in the immersive card artwork for Ho-Oh EX (3-Star) and Lugia EX (3-Star).”
“After internal review, we discovered that the card production team provided incorrect materials as official documents to the illustrator commissioned to create these cards,” the statement reads. “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. We are also conducting a broader investigation to ensure no similar issues exist elsewhere in the game.”
According to this statement, it seems that those in charge of providing reference materials to illustrator Sie Nanahara for the Ho-Oh EX card accidentally passed along fan art instead of an official piece handled by the company. Interestingly enough, while there weren’t any plagiarism accusations towards the 3-star Lugia art, this illustration was also removed from the game, presumably because it was also handled by Nanahara as part of the same seemingly faulty process. Sie Nanahara has done numerous illustrations for the physical Pokémon card game in the past, often using an inkbrush-inspired style that has made their work quite popular.
Those unaware of the situation are probably in for a bit of surprise if they pull the cards as is. Normally, when you get a 3-star immersive, which are some of the rarest cards in the game, it triggers an animation that pulls you into the art, hence the whole “immersive” descriptor. However, with the Ho-Oh and Lugia placeholders, the camera just zooms into a blank screen, a far cry from the much more dramatic animations that were datamined. While the developers of Pokémon TCG Pocket will undoubtedly try to fix the situation as soon as they can, until then, players can enjoy being sucked into the void whenever they snag these sought-after cards.
