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They should really give a few designs to the various toy branches earlier so they have something to work with. Not the whole dex obviously just a small handful like starter evolutions and a few early route pokemon.
The tcg branch definitely gets stuff early. In Japan the first set of a new generation usually comes out a month or two after the games come out. You need artists doing art for like 100+ cards and you need a rough idea of what these new Pokemon do so they can balance card effects around them so that they make sense.
