Hello, my name is Holon and I’m pretty new to this forum.
Let me just introduce the point of this thread with something I have noticed. I personally feel like a lot of newer cards feel less impactful and stunning in a way compared to their ancestors. The cards have a more mass-produced feel to them, and for the longest time I was under the impression that the quality in art had simply gone down. Here is the interesting discovery part that the title has brought you in here expecting.
After fooling around with an idea, I present to you the original and my edit:
I am now under the impression that it is not the art that has changed, but simply the format that makes all the difference.
I like your edit- however I will take the opposing side. I think the new cards are interesting and sport a really clean design. When you get lost in opening bulk and tons of packs of them, yeah, it gets old, but overall I think the cards look better than the WOTC cards.
That being said, the EX series has my favorite overall card design!
This is a very cool experiment! It shows that to some degree, we collect through the lens of nostalgia and not always for the art, but there’s beautiful art in every era of the TCG.
Personally, I also believe the ex-series had my favorite card layout.
i mostly don’t like the pokemon description and the weakness/retreat cost bar graphics. the HT and WT abbreviation gets me. Magic has been experimenting with more varied border designs in recent sets and it’d be nice to see some change to Pokemon. i have to agree that some of the aesthetic elements on the new pokemon cards (English) get old and stale very quick. also, the shadow effect on the image window on the older card design above really helps make the image appear to move closer to you, whereas the new design pushes the image farther into the distance. it’s subtle, but i like that optical effect of the older.
I like the way the old gen cards were framed. It directs your eye to the art. I also liked the lines sectioning off attacks. With the newer design, things just get lost. Definitely like the wotc design better, but that could just be nostalgia talking. Maybe I subconciously think of the newer layout as “cheap”
I agree with you, and I see almost all changes as improvements. However, I’ve never understood the appeal of the thicker border. Do people really prefer the old border over the newer ones? It’s literally unused space, and the size of the artwork suffers from it (or the image has to be compressed which messes with the proportions, as seen in your example).
Fun fact: This very compression effect is apparent in some Wotc cards because of the bigger border compared to Japanese cards. Compare the artwork of Neo Rev Raikou between English and Japanese. The English version is horizontally squeezed a little
The artwork has been on point since Sun & Moon, many very talented artists are being commissioned. The Snorlax one is one of the best examples. Alot of people don’t know how popular Kanahei is in Japan. Kanahei is super famous over there. Every card illustrated by Kanahei, is pure joy for alot of people.
I agree that the newer cards have an overall cleaner and more refined look than the wotc era cards. I like the frame of the artwork from the older cards a lot though.
For me, the format makes all the difference. The first thing I did when I got back into collecting was try and find cards with the ‘old format’ I grew up with featuring my favorite Pokemon, before I even knew to call them WOTC or E Series or anything along those lines. It was so thrilling for me to learn about cards with the original WOTC format that I didn’t know existed because I never had them as a kid, like Koga’s Beedrill or Neo Discovery Magnemite.
I might even say that the format singlehandedly determined which sets I’m interested in collecting as an adult, at least when I started. I had maybe one holo rare from Neo Revelation as a kid, but just because those cards look the same as the other sets I happened to grow up with I immediately grouped them in as cards I’d want to buy today.
