🕐 Reading time: 4 min
Hard to have missed that Mega Darkrai these past few weeks: a black silhouette swallowed by a whirl of shadow that almost draws an enormous eye. The card went everywhere. Behind it, one person: Akira Egawa.
Her cards get talked about a great deal, she herself much less. Yet her path explains why her illustrations stand out.
Who is Akira Egawa
Akira Egawa is a freelance illustrator and character designer. She came from 3D modelling, which she practised in video games, publishing, exhibitions and product design. And like a lot of people here, she grew up with a controller in hand: she has played Pokémon since Gold, Silver and Crystal.
She sums up her work with a question she keeps asking herself: what makes something "cool"? She looks for the answer everywhere, in photographs, in writing, in music, in food, in conversation. She started on the Pokémon Trading Card Game in 2019 with an unassuming card: a Riolu from the Unbroken Bonds set.
How she sees Pokémon
What makes her cards feel alive is the way she imagines Pokémon inside our world. For a Ninetales, she pictured the creature spending a thousand years in the same place, watching people settle and build a village. For a Machamp, she saw it living at a garage, lending a hand to fix cars.
Then comes the obsession with texture. Egawa works the grain of every surface by thinking about how it would feel under your fingers: the softness of fur, the hardness of muscle. Her goal fits in one phrase: the Pokémon should look alive, with an inner warmth and a bit of fight in it. Her Chi-Yu ex from Paldea Evolved shows it well, caught between the heat of fire and the weight of metal.
The turning point: the Crown Zenith Golds
In 2022, the Crown Zenith set (VSTAR Universe in Japan) handed her a prize assignment: the four Gold VSTAR cards of the Galarian Gallery, the creation trio (Dialga, Palkia, Giratina) and Arceus. Egawa painted them in full illustration, in gold and fire tones that stand apart from the rest of the set. Those four became the most sought-after cards in the expansion. From then on her name travelled, and she went from one illustrator among many to a signature that counts.
The Darkrai spotlight
Her Mega Darkrai ex SAR, in the Abyss Eye set, did the rest. The card flooded social media and placed her among the most closely followed illustrators of the moment. The effect spills well beyond that one card: when an artist breaks through, collectors work back through everything they have made, and the older cards gain value. Cards you could pick up quietly a year ago now change hands for a good deal more. That is what is happening to her right now.
What she says about the work
Egawa talks about her work without any showmanship. She owns up to one flaw: sometimes pushing the lighting and the poses too far, at the risk of drifting from the Pokémon's original design. Her current project is finding new poses, compositions and perspectives to chase down that elusive "cool".
The best part, for her, is still seeing her drawings become real cards, and strangers posting them saying how beautiful they are. She reads it as simple proof: Pokémon is a shared language, and it crosses borders.
How many cards has she signed
Since 2019, Egawa has produced 33 full-illustration cards, the ones where the artwork covers the whole surface. Counting reprints and versions, the specialist databases climb to around 90 cards in total, excluding TCG Pocket, the digital game. A solid body of work for an illustrator who arrived six years ago.
Want to go further on the artists? Read The illustrators who shaped Pokémon cards as well.