The team at Pokémon TCG Pocket – that is to say, the wildly popular trading card mobile game – has released a statement apologising to its community following a report that highlighted a piece of fan artwork which had been copied to create a card, saying it was provided “incorrect reference materials”.
Earlier this week, a Pokémon fan artist posted some comparison images of their own artwork of Legendary bird Ho-Oh next to an image of an upcoming card from Pokémon TCG Pocket’s 2025 expansion, which had been datamined. This datamined card showed the Pokémon in the same pose as the fan artwork, with others surmising that the image had been traced (via IGN).
You can see the two images below, with the fan art on the right:
Now, the Pokémon TCG Pocket team has released a statement about its upcoming expansion Wisdom of Sea and Sky, writing:
“It has come to our attention that there was a production issue regarding the illusion of Ho-Oh featured in the immersive card artwork for Ho-Oh EX (3-star) and Lagia EX (3-star).
“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 such, the developer has said it will now replace these cards with placeholders for the time being, while it works to provide new artwork as soon as it is able. It will also conduct further investigations “to ensure no similar issues” are present elsewhere within the game itself.
“To all our players who have been looking forward to this expansion, and to the talented illustrators who bring the Pokémon world to life, we deeply apologise for any inconvenience this has caused,” the developer wrote. “We take this matter very seriously and are committed to strengthening our quality control process to prevent this from happening again.”
The Pokémon TCG Pocket closed by thanking its community for their understanding and patience, as well as the continued support. “We remain dedicated to delivering an experience that you can enjoy,” it said.
The game’s Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion was announced during this month’s Pokémon Presents stream, which also gave us a fresh look at Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and a new stop-motion Pokémon TV show from Wallace and Gromit maker Aardman.