I’d be shocked if this hasn’t already been discussed here at some point, so feel free to link me to another thread if the topic has been beat to death.
When I got back into serious collecting fairly recently, with a bit more capital than I had as a kid/student, I decided that I’d make it a grail goal of mine to obtain prints or, maybe one day, original copies of some Pokémon card art. Naively, I assumed this wasn’t a totally unreasonable goal… This ultimately faulty assumption was based on the fact that original MTG card art surfaces pretty regularly, for high (but not outlandish) prices. I figured the reason I had never seen original Pokémon card art for sale was because I had never really hunted.
Well, in the ensuing months, I have hunted pretty extensively and have turned up zilch, zero, nada. Nothing for sale and no public records of sales, even for prints, much less originals. The only thing I’ve ever turned up remotely in the ballpark was a small-ish print of the set/box artwork for, IIRC, Split Earth or Mysterious Mountains that was apparently released in Japan in some extremely limited quantity.
Does anyone have any insider knowledge on where the hell all the original Pokémon card art is, or educated speculation? I assume some of it is digital, but even then one would expect the artists to sell prints here and there. Is it all in a vault somewhere in Japan? Are the artists contractually prohibited from profiting off their art outside of the game?
This is mostly just a curiosity case, at this point. I assume that even if it were possible to find/buy original art, the fact that it is scarce to the point of nonexistence would make it prohibitively expensive.
In MTG an artist is selling the right to use their art on the card, but not their actual piece. This is why even with new sets you see works done for them sold frequently. Japanese culture is much more strict about these types of things, and many of the artists aren’t allowed to draw Pokemon at all outside of conventions and other events that they are pre-approved to do it at.
Pokemon keeps a pretty tight grip on the stuff, but we have seen some of it pop up, like Sugimori pieces at a British museum in 2019
This makes sense; figured it was something along these lines. I wonder what the incentive is in retaining total control of the art… Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Pokémon, unlike Magic, derives most of its value from the intellectual property of the characters themselves. If an MTG artist paints a mountain for a land art, it’s just a picture of a mountain… if a Pokémon artist draws a Pikachu for a Pokémon card, the art contains IP owned by TPC. That seems like a plausible explanation.
I wonder what kind of price original art would command if it ever surfaced. Those Sugimori sketches you posted would certainly be worth a fortune.
In MTG they are still allowed to sell pieces even with intellectual property of WotC, such as the Lotus, Moxen, Jace etc.
They also kept the original art of Pokemon very tight even before it had really gotten mega popular, so I think it has more to do with culture than Pokemon itself. That is just my personal guess though
This is unfortunately true for Nintendo in general. I won’t make a sweeping claim that there’s no Nintendo art out there, but you’d certainly be hard pressed to obtain any of it, even if money is not an option.
And that’s part of why the (general) UNpopularity of signatures in this community is surprising to me. Some day those artists won’t be around anymore, and none of us will ever be able to touch or even come close to an original. All we have is offset prints on cardboard … yet there are people that don’t think a signature+doodle makes a card 100x more special? It almost seems backwards to me.
I’ve had the same thoughts regarding signatures, particularly the ones with little doodles. I am endlessly beating myself up about not shelling out for some autograph slots at that Fukuda signing a year or so ago.
As someone who owns 3 pieces of original MTG art, I would fucking LOVE to own some original Pokemon art. I still find original MTG art to be one of the most underrated things in the MTG market. Even today, you can pick up lots of 1/1 original art for <$1500. Not repaints or prints, but the original art that was scanned in for use on a card.
There has been some discussion of Pokemon original art in MTG art groups on FB and the clear reality is that Pokemon original art just isn’t a thing for IP reasons. Very unfortunate, but this is the reality.
Signatures can go both ways. In MTG, there are some rare signatures (i.e., Chippy) that increase the value of the card significantly and there are some common signatures (i.e., Rob Alexander) that decrease the value of the card significantly. Some signatures are so common, in fact, that it becomes rarer to find an unsigned version of a card than a signed version. Just earlier this year, I sold a pack fresh foil Japanese Onslaught Polluted Delta (unsigned) for $2k. The buyer could’ve bought a signed one for $1k but bought mine because Rob Alexander has seemingly signed the majority of copies in existence.
I take a similar attitude with Pokemon as I do with MTG. I have zero interest in signed cards. To me, they’re damaged. I understand the appeal, but it’s not an objectively good thing for a card to be signed.
Just did some digging, and found that ファミ通 (Fami-Tsu) a Weekly game/ technology magazine has released a special edition where it commemorated the 30th anniversary of Game Freak. It has 42 pages talking about the history of the company, its games, and a showcase of the concept arts of Pokemon and other games.
Reading some of the excerpts and looking at the pictures, most gamefreak and respective owners of the Pokemon franchise own the artwork published. I also think that the artists own some of the artwork as well.
Did anyone else see the recent MTG original art that was sold on Heritage? $168k for Demonic Tutor (for those who don’t know, this is one of the most iconic and powerful cards in the game; it’s also still widely played in EDH). $168k is astonishingly low, IMO. FWIW, there was a $250k offer for it prior to the auction. It’s undoubtedly in the top ~20 most coveted pieces of MTG art. If it’s only worth $168k, then it’s hard to imagine that any other MTG art (even P9) is worth more than $250k-$300k. I would’ve guessed a sale of at least $300K+ (based on past offers and sales data for other pieces).
Not to self-promote, but if you go to my Instagram in my sig there’s a pic of the Japanese version (it’s a few posts down, next to a candle and a Venusaur plush lol). You can also Google “Pokemon Trading Card Game Illustration Collection,” which is the English title, but the Japanese version looks a lot cooler IMO, even though I can’t read it.
The problem was that Len was not very cooperative when he initially posted the entire lot on fb. He probably good flooded with dms as he literally posted a list consisting out of only holy grail items (alpha art, alpha 9.5 set, beta 9.5 set etc etc). That combined with his high initial asking prices (like 400k for dt iirc) deterred a lot of interested parties. I definitely agree that it was a surprisingly low price on the dt but on the flipside, the other pieces did very well imo. I would be interested to see if actual “investors” are starting to get interested in these pieces. As far as I know, almost all of the top bidders are still deeply involved with mtg. If outside interest can pick up, these prices should skyrocket.
