I am deeply fascinated by this sleeping, yawning Pikachu that won this year’s Pokemon TCG illustration contest

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The final results of the Pokemon TCG 2024 illustration contest are in. I am thrilled with the winning entry.

Earlier this year, The Pokemon Company held a contest for fans of the series to submit artwork that, if won, would be turned into an official Pokemon Trading Card Game card (oh, and the winner would also receive $5,000, which is nice). The contest results were finally announcedand the winner is an artist named Kazuki Minami, who drew what is probably the best Pikachu card I’ve ever seen. You can see it at the end of the video, which shows a few other entries, or just look at the top of this page, but for those of you who don’t want to do either of those things, it’s a lovingly rendered image of Pikachu yawning and scratching his head with his foot, filled with such a real sense of life that it can be so difficult to do.

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“I’m truly honored to receive this award,” Minami said in a statement. “Since it was my first time entering this contest, I wasn’t sure what to draw or how to draw it. Then I saw my dog, which was cute – it inspired me to draw Pikachu in a way that reminded me of my dog. So the award belongs to my dog ​​as much as it does to me, and we’re both extremely happy and honored. Thank you.”

One judge even noted that he thought it was “difficult to draw the Pikachu that everyone knows for the contest theme”, but was “impressed by the natural and unadorned depiction of Pikachu’s everyday life as a living being”.

Speaking of the Pokemon TCG, Alex recently had the chance to try out the upcoming Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket mobile app, saying that “even a very short stint of playing Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic tells me that it’s scratching my itch in all the right ways. It’s that rare mobile game that I’ll be playing from day one – and I see myself as a competitive collector and player of this app not just for a little while – but for the long haul.”

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