The Pokémon TCG Pocket Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion is officially out as of today with all-new Johto cards.
However, the release day excitement has been dampened after it was discovered that immersive Ho-Oh EX featured stolen fan art.
One of the rarest cards in the expansion featured artwork that had traced over 2021 work created by fan-artist lanjiujiu.
The Pokémon artwork had been datamined before the official release, and the community were quick to express their anger.
But DeNa were also quick to respond and immediately removed any art from both the Immersive versions of Ho-Oh EX and Lugia EX.
Instead, anyone fortunate enough to pack the rare cards will be met with text that says “New Art Coming Soon.”
The Pokémon Pocket publishers released a statement along with the launch of the A4 expansion, saying:
“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 reference 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.”
While the issue was with Ho-Oh’s art, Lugia EX has had its immersive art removed too.
This is because during the immersive animation, the same traced Ho-Oh art appears at the end.
There is currently no word on how long it will take to replace these card arts.
On the one hand, immersive cards feature the most complex art in the game, but both just need a new Ho-Oh in a static position.
Pokémon TCG Pocket releases nice quality of life update
Along with the Johto expansion, Pokémon Pocket has received some nice updates.
DeNA has already released significant changes that could save ranked mode in Pokémon TCG Pocket.
And now, the game has added an option to finally claim multiple rewards at once instead of clicking endlessly.
For example, in the new shop where you can spend now-defunct trade tokens, you can select all 60 available hourglasses at once.
Those are a nice boost, but once you’ve run out of Pokémon Pocket pack hourglasses, you can also gamble at online casinos.
The option to select multiple at once should also work for the hourglasses purchasable with shop tickets.
And in addition to that, you can now see how many copies you have of a card when spending pack points.
This is massively beneficial, as you previously had to jump through multiple menus just to check.
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