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Strangely enough, the card game seemed to have been in development before red and green came out. People internally must've known that pokemon wouldve at least had relative success (ofcourse nobody thought itd become what it was at the height of pokemania).
Evidence for this is that the card game came out like 7 or 8 months after red and green were released in japan and also in the first boosters artwork, charizard has its beta design (seen in 1 or 2 sugimori artworks that can be found online) despite the games already being out for a decent amount of time.
So based on this, it isnt too far of a stretch to assume that the anime team had access to info before the games release and that eventually became outdated (like blaine's design). No one was given "old info", it was as current as could be at the time. But big projects like anime and card games cant just change things up at a moments notice.
Was really hoping to see a 1 horned charizard in the files HC received but I guess charizards sprite was from one of the later builds.
