>>46034670I wasn't actually going to bring it up because the TCG has always stepped outside the bounds of canon. But yes, in the first two gens, cards were being developed alongside the games and there were some concepts exchanged between them.
Notably, the spaceworld beta included sprites and names for 'Impostor Oak,' a scrapped plotline where Oak was replaced by an evil doppelganger (cough cough). It had initially appeared in the gen 1 cards, but the Gen 2 NEO expansions also received a new impostor oak card despite the character being cut from the games. At the very least it shows that the early cards do represent ideas not entirely detached from the games
