I am deeply obsessed with this sleepy, yawning Pikachu that won the Pokemon TCG Illustration Contest this year

The final results for the winner of the Pokemon TCG Illustration Contest 2024 are in, and I’m in love with the winning piece.

Earlier this year, The Pokemon Company held a competition for fans of the series to submit some art that if it won, would be made into an official Pokemon Trading Card Game card (oh the winner gets $5000 too, which is nice). The results of the competition have finally been announced, and the winner is an artist by the name of Kazuki Minami, who drew maybe the best Pikachu card I’ve ever seen. You can see it at the end of a video that shows a bunch of the other submissions, or just look at the top of this page, but for those of you that don’t want to do either of those things, it’s a lovingly rendered piece showing Pikachu yawning and scratching its head with its foot, filled with such a real sense of life that can be so hard to do.

“I’m truly honored to receive this prize,” Minami said in a statement. “As this was my first time taking part in this contest, I wasn’t sure what to draw and how to draw it. That’s when my dog came into my sight being cute – I was inspired to draw Pikachu in such a way that reminds me of my dog. So the prize 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 they thought it was “difficult to draw the Pikachu that everyone knows for this contest’s theme,” but was “impressed by the natural and unadorned depiction of Pikachu’s daily life as a living creature.”

Speaking of the Pokemon TCG, Alex recently got to try out the upcoming mobile app Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket saying that “even a very short period of time playing Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic tells me that this is scratching the right itches in the right way. It’s that rare mobile game I’ll be there for day one – and I could see myself becoming a competitive collector and player in this app not just for a little bit – but longer term.”