Pokémon Company removes two TCG Pocket card designs and ‘deeply apologises’ following claims of plagiarism

The Pokémon Company has “deeply apologised” after allegations that the latest expansion in its Trading Card Game Pocket app features plagiarised art.

The mobile game received its latest update, Wisdom of Sea & Sky, earlier today but before this some of the card artwork was shared online.

This led to Chinese artist @lanjiujiu noting on X that artwork they had previously done of Ho-Oh appeared to have been used as the basis for one of the new cards in the expansion.

The Pokémon Company has now posted a statement which suggests that the illustrator who was commissioned created the card designs for the game was sent “incorrect reference materials” from the game’s card production team, which were wrongly presented as official art and led to the artist using them as a reference for the card art.

？。？？？？？？ https://t.co/RpaBHRfW1h pic.twitter.com/e5ggVtnD7Q

— 昼时歌 (@lanjiujiu) July 29, 2025

The Pokémon Company has now removed the design of both the Ho-Oh EX and Lugia EX cards for now, replacing them with a placeholder image which simply says “New Art Coming Soon”.

Both cards are ‘immersive’ cards, which means holding down on them triggers an animation. This has also been removed, meaning players simply see a black screen.

“We want to share an important update regarding the upcoming expansion, Wisdom of Sea and Sky,” a statement from the company reads. “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).

“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.

“We are also conducting a broader investigation to ensure no similar issues exist elsewhere in the game.

“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 apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We take this matter very seriously and are committed to strengthening our quality control processes to prevent this from happening again.”

In a statement posted on X, the artist @lanjiujiu said they hoped the matter had been resolved following The Pokémon Company’s statement.

“I’ve seen official announcement and am grateful for the prompt resolution,” they said (via machine translation). “I hope this matter can be put to rest.

“I posted that post simply because I was confused after seeing the image online, and couldn’t confirm it was real game data. Because I couldn’t control the subsequent escalation of the situation, I consciously stopped posting on social media yesterday.

“For me, I simply completed a commissioned work and had no involvement in the subsequent model production, sales, or profit sharing. However, this does reflect my lack of rigorous understanding of copyright at the time. I will carefully verify the intended use of my work in future drawings to avoid similar incidents.

“Thank you very much to the operations team for their attention and response. Thank you for promptly removing the image. I am very grateful that this matter was handled promptly, and I thank everyone who spoke out about it.”