| 20 May 2026
Pokémon Trading Cards reveal visual stereotypes of natural minerals
Abstract. Popular media often simplifies Earth materials into idealized forms, shaping public understanding of geology. To investigate this effect, this study analyzed 202 mineral illustrations from the Pokémon Trading Card Game between 1999 and 2026. By quantifying visual characteristics through Multiple Correspondence Analysis, a dominant "universal crystal template" was identified, defined by large, transparent, high-symmetry prismatic crystals in cave environments. This representation contrasts with natural systems, where minerals commonly occur as irregular, rock-forming aggregates. Comparisons between human interpretation and AI-based identification further show that these stylized images lack sufficient diagnostic information for consistent classification. While human interpretation incorporates contextual cues, AI models rely on simplified geometric features and exhibit strong anchoring bias. These results demonstrate that widely circulated media not only simplifies geological reality but systematically reinforces visual stereotypes of minerals.
General comments
I strongly believe this is a great manuscript that draws attention to popular types of media that non-geologists can easily encounter in the public domain. It is therefore important to understand how geology is represented in these media. Video games have been covered in several papers in the past few years, but this manuscript makes the reader consider other media forms, especially those other than film/TV.
The manuscript was well written, and the author, who is clearly a PTCG collector, considered many of the key aspects about the PTCG during their research, such as focusing only on English cards to avoid missing other language-exclusive artworks, and to make the dataset more manageable. They clearly put a lot of effort into analysing the data and presented it clearly.
I do, however, have some concerns about the content of the manuscript, such as whether it is plausible enough to consider that PTCG collectors would use AI to identify minerals in the artwork, especially when it is so rare for a card to include a mineral. Perhaps the AI aspect would be more appropriate as its own manuscript, investigating how accurately they perform against popular media forms (e.g. stills from movies, or in comic books as well). Furthermore, the final summary points and conclusion feel rushed and leave the reader lacking in their understanding of why this research is truly important.
Specific comments
Does the author truly believe that there is a significant number of PTCG collectors who would use AI to identify minerals within the artwork? As a geologist and PTCG collector myself, I have never once considered the accuracy of the illustrations on the cards, nor thought to use AI to identify them. In my experience of over 20 years in the hobby, collectors are more likely to appreciate nice artwork and not question the realism of it. This can potentially even go as far as most collectors recognising it is depicting a fantasy world and therefore it is acceptable for the artwork to not be accurate.
If Pokémon cards that contain minerals only account for 1% of the entire English printed roster, how many ‘mineral cards’ would the average collector actually have/see? Taking a reasonable number of 2000 in a collection, that would equate to someone only having 20 ‘mineral cards’. This seems very low and might not have a significant impact on their understanding of true mineral structures. Furthermore, is it not possible collectors are able to understand that the artwork contains fantasy elements given they depict fantasy monsters.
Ice was identified by a human expert (the author) as the most common mineral (Figure 4). However, it is barely spoken about within the text. Instead, the text focuses mainly on the other five identifiable minerals (e.g. quartz, calcite, and zircon). What is ice’s significance to the results in terms of accuracy of illustrations, reasonable environments etc? Either explain the results regarding ice or remove it from the criteria/data.
The implications of this research (Sections 4.3 and 5) feel very rushed. The results strongly support the author’s conclusion that mineral depiction within PTCG is oversimplified. However, the reasoning provided for this is lacking, only stated as influenced by gemstone markets and museum displays. The author does not appear to consider the fact that many PTCG illustrators likely lack a geological background and that some art styles may purposely choose not to take inspiration from realism or detailed accuracy (e.g. Shinji Kanda or Hyogonosuke). The author does allude to the latter in Section 4.1 but not considered again. After 30 years of producing Pokémon cards, the hobby is arguably more popular than ever, and a lack of accurately illustrated minerals does not appear to dissuade collectors. Therefore, is the Pokémon Company not justified in its approach to continue to “reproduce this selective imagery”? It would be great to expand further on these considerations.
Continuing the last point, the author simply says “geoscience educators might consider addressing these media representations”, which I agree with. However, it would be great to also expand on this further and provide examples. This would improve the significance of the manuscript by providing educators with potential starting points that they could adapt into their lessons.
Technical comments