Lugia is probably pretty useless by itself, but they put the Cyndaquil line on its pack, so I have no choice. It sucks that Umbreon is on Ho-oh (and it's also a very weird thematic choice?)
I have to say, the ex selection this time around is very weird. Not complaining becaude Shuckle getting it is funny and my boi Kingdra is there, but it's really weird we got no Scizor, no steelix , no Tyranitar and such.
You know, the red Gyarados being here could have been an insanely cool thing...if they had not devaluated shinies by insisting on putting them on every single pack. I really don't get why they didn't follow the physical TCG format with them, or just use them more sparingly.
So the twitter account addressed the issue with the ho-oh card and both it and lugia will be replaced. So far normal, but something im curious about is that they say that the issue was incorrect material was given, which implies the fanart was used alongside official ho oh reference. idk if this is just corpo speak, but assuming its not i wonder how it got there? i assume its mostly ignorance of thinking somethings official and not double checking
Veeery late reply, but considering the Indigo Disk outright used a fan remix of Area Zero for a trailer (which was eventually fixed), I could actually believe they are incompetent enough for this to have happened.
On the other hand it does sound like corporate bullshit and a cop out, specially since you would think the artist herself would have said something. Now, I have never worked for such a big company as an illustrator, so I have no idea if she could have truly been asked to just use that exact same pose (as any artist will tell you, that doesn't excuse tracing, which not only doesn't happen by accident but it's obviously a concious decision, so the only explanation would be that she was also given a ridiculously short deadline) but that sounds very odd to me, at least on an inmersive card. The entire point of these is to hire extremely high profile artist to let them do their work, just look at Buzzlord for example. It's possible that she would be asked to use a pose for reference, but never would be forced to literally trace it.
For what is worth, considering the rather stellar quality of her previous work I would rather believe she didn't plagiarize a fan art, but really the only way to know is to wait, if with time she never shows up again in the TCG...yeah not a coincidence.
Either way this was a mess considering it's litwrally the two most important cards in the entire expansion. Either the company really is that messy, or the artist suddenly felt the need to trace artwork, either way TPCi has messed up pretty badly.
