Gaming controversies are nothing new. In fact, just in 2025 alone, there have been MANY such controversies for people to find and react to, with some of them being particularly bad. As with many such controversies, “half the battle” isn’t committing them, it’s how you react to them. In the case of Pokemon TCG Pocket, its latest controversy had to do with art for its newest card expansion. Specifically, a special Ho-Oh card that was a featured card for the set was found to have been drawn using fan art as a reference instead of official Pokemon Company renderings. That caused a huge stink, and fans reacted quickly, with The Pokemon Company pulling the card afterward and promising new art for it and its partner card, Lugia.
The problem now, though, is that when The Pokemon Company dropped the two new art images for the cards, while Ho-Oh was fine…Lugia looked a bit “off.” You can see the cards yourself in this Reddit thread, which allows you to zoom in on the cards, but the reaction from fans is pretty clear: they don’t like the Lugia art.
Many people made jokes about how Lugia looks, with some not only stating that the original art was better, but that the PLACEHOLDER art was better than this. For the record, the placeholder was nothing more than text, so that’s quite the insult.
Sadly, it gets even worse, for many people pointed out that the art not only didn’t really “feel like Lugia,” but that Lugia was posed rather oddly. When you add in the “darkness elements” that surround it, you might get an incorrect vibe on what Lugia is as a Pokemon and as a character. Given that its debut movie is on YouTube right now to watch for free, what you see in this card is nothing like what you see in that film.
The pose is giving people the most “off vibes,” as Lugia, as a Pokemon doesn’t move like that or use its wings like that. Use, those are its wings, and yet, they look more like arms and hands in that shot, which isn’t how it’s supposed. Ironically, now people are saying that Ho-Oh’s art looks MUCH better than Lugia’s!
As if that’s not enough, many people feel that the Pokemon TCG Pocket artist was given a different Pokemon’s “battle pose” from Gen 9 and told to recreate that, which only made things worse. Know your source material, people!
