Fun facts

Things hidden in the artwork, cards that were quietly changed before they reached English, and a few numbers that are stranger than they should be.

How to read this page. The card, set, rarity and illustrator under every image were read from the TCGdex API and are checked. What is said to be hidden inside the artwork is collector lore, and no API can check a picture, so those sit behind a button and are written as things people say rather than things we counted.

Look closer

Six cards with something in the background. Have a look first, then check what you were supposed to find.

Pikachu

151 · Illustration rare
Illustrated by Hiroyuki Yamamoto

Mew ex

Paldean Fates · Special illustration rare
Illustrated by USGMEN

Meowth

Wizards Black Star Promos · Common
Illustrated by Kagemaru Himeno

Cool Porygon

Wizards Black Star Promos · Common
Illustrated by Hiromichi Sugiyama

Omastar

Arceus · Rare
Illustrated by Hajime Kusajima

Kabutops

Arceus · Holo Rare
Illustrated by Hajime Kusajima

Cards that changed

Artwork edited between the Japanese and international releases, or between print runs. Grouped in the source by reason: mature content, religious and political symbols, accidental gestures, violence and gambling.

Misty's Tears

Gym Challenge · Uncommon
Illustrated by Ken Sugimori

The original Japanese art was scrapped rather than edited, and redrawn as Squirtle catching her tears. The API credits Sugimori on the version that shipped.

Koga's Ninja Trick

Gym Challenge · Uncommon
Illustrated by Sumiyoshi Kizuki

A Buddhist manji in the original read as a swastika to Western audiences, and was replaced with a generic red ninja emblem.

Sabrina's Gengar

Gym Heroes · Holo Rare
Illustrated by Ken Sugimori

A graveyard of crosses in the background became a flat purple void.

Grimer

Team Rocket · Common
Illustrated by Kagemaru Himeno

The pupils were redirected forward. At the original angle it read as looking up a bystander’s skirt, which nobody intended.

Moo-Moo Milk

Neo Genesis · Common
Illustrated by Tomokazu Komiya

A Sentret suckling from a cow-themed milkskin became milk poured from a jar, redrawn by the same artist.

Arcade Game

Neo Genesis · Rare

Cropped to hide the casino backdrop. The corpus filed this as card 74, which is a Snubbull.

Card-Flip Game

Neo Genesis · Uncommon

Same treatment, same reason. Filed in the corpus as card 76, which is a Stantler.

Magmortar

Dragons Exalted · Rare
Illustrated by Akira Komayama

The cannon was turned away from the viewer. Filed in the corpus as card 22, which is a Ho-Oh-EX.

Pikachu

Base Set · Common
Illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita

Red cheeks in the earliest English runs, yellow after. Collectors call them Red Cheeks and Yellow Cheeks, and the red ones only exist as 1st Edition and Shadowless prints.

One well-known design change is deliberately not in this list. Jynx was redesigned across the whole franchise, not just on a card, and the reason is a real-world story about racial caricature rather than a piece of trivia. It deserves proper coverage, which this is not the place for.

The Black Lotus artist drew two Pokemon cards

Christopher Rush illustrated Black Lotus, the most famous card in Magic: The Gathering. He also illustrated Mewtwo. This is usually told as “exactly one Pokemon card”, which is the kind of detail worth checking: the API returns two, because the promo art was reprinted in Legendary Collection.

Mewtwo

Wizards Black Star Promos · Common
Illustrated by Christopher Rush

The promo printing.

Mewtwo

Legendary Collection · Rare
Illustrated by Christopher Rush

And the reprint, which is why "exactly one card" is wrong.

By the numbers

These four came straight out of the Pokemon TCG API, so unlike everything above them they need no hedge at all.

rarity values that actually exist

Rare Holo Star, Rare Shiny, Shiny Rare, Rare Shiny GX and Shiny Ultra Rare are five separate values. A reader would reasonably expect one or two.

subtypes

ex and EX are two of them, which quietly folds two decades of card design into a casing difference.

rarity written in SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE

MEGA_ATTACK_RARE. The other 37 are Title Case, so that one is a raw enum leaking through the API rather than a display string.

5 of 7

retired mechanics you can still query

Star, Prime, LEGEND, BREAK and TAG TEAM are all real subtypes. Crystal and Delta Species are not, so those two need a different query.

The light test runs backwards on a slab

Collectors are taught that light passing through a card is a bad sign. On a PSA label it is the opposite: light getting through is what says the label is real. A forger adding a fake front adds a layer of paper, and that blocks it.

“If you hold an authentic PSA-certified item up to a light at close range, looking from the back of the label to the front or the front of the label to the back, you should be able to see through the label enough to decipher the text on the other side.”

PSA Security: A Buyer’s Guide, read 2026-09-10.

Worth knowing which way round it goes, because somebody who has only learned the card rule will read a genuine slab exactly wrong.

Off the card

Card databases know what a Pokemon is worth and nothing about what it did. Twelve of sixty-four, picked for range rather than popularity.

Pokemon	Debut	Episode	Film	Why it matters
Pikachu	Generation I	EP039, Pikachu's Goodbye	M20, I Choose You!	The franchise mascot, and the only one with an Alola Cap form.
Mewtwo	Generation I	EP063, The Battle of the Badge	M01, Mewtwo Strikes Back	Genetically engineered, and both antagonist and protagonist depending on the film.
Charizard	Generation I	EP105, Charizard Chills	M03, Spell of the Unown	Two Mega Evolutions and a Gigantamax form.
Lucario	Generation IV	XY030, Mega Revelations!	M08, Lucario and the Mystery of Mew	Carried a film on its own, which few non-legendaries have.
Snorlax	Generation I	EP072, Snack Attack	M20, I Choose You!	Blocks a road in the games and does roughly the same job on screen.
Eevee	Generation I	EP040, The Battling Eevee Brothers	M21, The Power of Us	One base form, the most branches of any line.
Gengar	Generation I	EP023, The Tower of Terror	M20, I Choose You!	The ghost that the first genuinely frightening episode was built around.
Gyarados	Generation I	EP012, Here Comes the Squirtle Squad	M02, The Power of One	The red one is a plot device more often than a Pokemon.
Jigglypuff	Generation I	EP045, Song of Jigglypuff	M01, Mewtwo Strikes Back	A recurring gag that outlasted most recurring characters.
Meowth	Generation I	EP070, Go West Young Meowth	M01, Mewtwo Strikes Back	Taught itself to speak, which is a plot point rather than a quirk.
Lapras	Generation I	EP079, The Lost Lapras	M02, The Power of One	Transport, then a herd, then written out. A full arc for a water type.
Dragonite	Generation I	EP063, The Battle of the Badge	M02, The Power of One	The courier Dragonite is a different individual from the battling ones.

Sources

Card identity, set, rarity and illustrator: TCGdex API, read 2026-09-09.
Rarity and subtype counts: Pokemon TCG API, read 2026-09-07.
The stories behind the artwork are collector lore, gathered but not yet sourced to a primary reference. Treat them as things to check, not as established fact.
The slab label test is quoted from PSA directly, read 2026-09-10. It is the only claim on this page with a primary source behind it.
Screen appearances are editorial, compiled from Fandom, Wikipedia, Bulbapedia and Serebii.