Goodbye to ‘New Art Coming Soon’, hello Lugia and Ho-Oh: Pokémon TCG Pocket adds new artwork for the plagiarized cards

Last week, Pokémon TCG Pocket took an unprecedented and controversial step, removing the artwork from the immersive Lugia and Ho-Oh cards from the A4 set Wisdom of Sea and Sky due to a case of plagiarism. Now, DeNA has updated the placeholders with new artwork, and although they finally have an image as one would expect, the new illustrations still fail to convince fans.

Pokémon TCG Pocket finally adds the censored card illustrations of Lugia and Ho-Oh due to plagiarism

On Friday, August 8, 2025, Pokémon TCG Pocket was updated with new illustrations for the immersive rare cards of Lugia ex and Ho-Oh ex from the Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion, which debuted at the end of July this year. These are two new, previously unseen artworks that have been created from scratch, completely avoiding the accusations of plagiarism that caused problems with the previous illustrations.

These two new images show these two Legendary Pokémon from Johto, but the illustrations still fail to convince fans of the series, especially the one of Lugia. According to many fans, Lugia’s pose is unnatural, with its chest puffed out to such an extent that it defies its anatomical limits and does not fit the character’s personality at all, as this pose is arrogant.

The original illustrations were removed due to a very specific issue. A few hours after the expansion arrived on Pokémon TCG Pocket, an illustrator known as @lanjiujiu on X reported a case of plagiarism in a post that no longer exists, and indeed, the evidence was irrefutable: the Ho-Oh ex from the immersive rare card had been practically copied from an illustration by this digital artist. The problem also affected the Lugia ex immersive rare card for one reason: the illustrations of both were actually part of the same mural, so another piece of art had to be created from scratch for this creature as well.

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The temporary solution that was resorted to was mocked on social media due to the unexpected and grotesque nature of the situation: the cards remained in the game, but without the illustrations, with text that read “New Art Coming Soon,” which led to all kinds of jokes and memes about it.

Although DeNA has resolved this serious issue within a reasonable time frame, the proposed solution still does not satisfy everyone, as the consensus is that the original illustrations were superior to the revised ones. Perhaps a less convoluted and more dignified solution for the aggrieved artist would have been to reach an agreement with her to not only credit her, but also to compensate her appropriately for the use of her art in the game. In any case, the creators of Pokémon TCG Pocket have shown that they take issues concerning authorship and intellectual property rights seriously, and are working hard to ensure that such cases do not occur again in the future.

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