Hello everyone. I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few points that have come up from time to time on our discord, especially regarding the artworks used for the cards.

First and foremost a reminder that this is a niche fan project that is entirely free and non-profit. We haven’t received a cent for our work on this game in 10+ years, and we never intended to do so. We never sold the cards anywhere either. The idea was always to create a game that people could print and play with friends anywhere. A proxy-minded approach if you will, not a commercial product.

While we design the rules, cards and interactions and a lot of work is put into the mechanics and gameplay, we don’t create the artwork from scratch. Most of it comes from the actual official images that we maybe edit or tweak to fit our needs. We also have used fanart when no official option is available.

The rights to most artwork belongs to the original artist (which Konami never discloses), that’s why we moved away from using an “Art by X” line on each card that we had in previous versions of the game, because in that scenario 95% of the cards would have “Art by Konami” and would be a bit deceiving. Instead, we made a Credits section in this website that we try to keep updated as we release new sets.

When it comes to fanart: its awesome to feature it since it reflects the community’s creativity and passion for this franchise. Whenever possible we try to reach out to artists for permission. Most who respond are ok with the use of their artwork in a free fan-project like ours. But for the ones that are not ok with it (which is in their right), we simply remove or change the art. Because this is a volunteer project run by fans for fans (with like 0 budget other than time), to commision original art is not an option for us.

So, what about AI? In truth, we have been using “AI” in this project for almost a decade, mainly to upscale low-resolution images. We have used these “AI” tools like Waifu2x when they were known as “deep neural network applications” and before the term “AI” was attached to them, as they were useful to create better resolution of Anime artwork that we couldn’t get in higher quality otherwise.

As time went on, technology advanced and nowadays it is possible to create highly detailed artwork purely with AI tools. Our usage of these AI tools remains mostly limited to upscaling and redrawing art that already exists. This is combined with our edits using traditional image editing software to produce the cards. In rare cases (such as when a card has no official art or suitable fanart) we may use AI generated art to fill the gap, but these cases are always the exception rather than the rule.

Our priority is always to highlight official artwork first: OCG or Anime artwork is the main priority for cards, although we may use TCG artwork here and there if it makes sense. We only move to fanart or ai-art to keep the project moving when other options are not available.