Pokémon officially admits it stole a fan design

The Pokémon Company has, in a surprising turn of events, outright admitted that they accidentally pilfered the artwork for one of their legendary ‘Mons from a fan, and has already altered the official artwork in a bid to fix things.

Last week, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon TCG Pocket would be receiving a brand new expansion, centred around Pokémon Gold and Silver.

The Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion dropped on July 29, and naturally features new cards based on the legendary birds Lugia and Ho-Oh.

The Pokémon Company has admitted it took a fan design without permission

However, mere hours before The Wisdom of Sea and Sky’s release, a Pokémon fan artist by the name of Lanjiujiu on Twitter noticed something odd; the artwork for the Ho-Oh EX card appeared to be a one-for-one match with artwork they had produced back in 2021.

As initially reported by TheGamer's Sam Woods, thousands of people bombarded Lanjiujiu’s post on Twitter with angry messages, accusing The Pokémon Company of directly plagiarising their work.

One user even theorised that Pokémon TCG Pocket’s artist Sie Nanahara may have accidentally used an unofficial figurine, which was based on Lanjiujiu’s artwork, as a reference, and was unaware of the fact that said figurine wasn’t an officially licensed Pokémon Company product.

Turns out that that user may have been correct, as The Pokémon Company just released an official statement on the Pokémon website stating that Sie Nanahara was provided with “incorrect materials” to use as reference, and that the artwork has already been removed from Pokémon TCG Pocket as a result.

“We want to share an important update regarding the upcoming expansion, Wisdom of Sea and Sky. It has come to our attention that 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)”, reads the statement on the official Pokémon site.

“After internal review, we discovered that the card production team provided incorrect 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.”

It’s oddly refreshing to see a big-name company like this not only immediately tackle the situation and apologise, but also not throw the illustrator under the bus in the process.

Sie Nanahara is a wonderful artist, and I actually own a few of her full art cards from the physical Pokémon TCG sets, so it’s nice to see that The Pokémon Company hasn’t opted to simply shift all of the blame for the mistake onto her.

Here’s hoping that Lanjiujiu gets some kind of compensation for all of this, though. Maybe The Pokémon Company could offer them a paid gig and let them produce some artwork for the next Pokémon TCG Pocket set?