On October 17 Santa Cruz Skateboards releases 30 skate decks, each one built around the original artwork from a real Pokemon card. Base Set Charizard is in there, which surprises nobody. So is a 24 year old holo of a corrupted Espeon that almost nobody outside the vintage crowd thinks about. Dark Espeon made the list on the strength of its illustration alone, and it was painted by the person who designed Espeon in the first place.
The art
Dark Espeon, 4 of 105, Neo Destiny, February 28, 2002, illustrated by Atsuko Nishida. The scan above is the 1st Edition print, stamp visible on the left edge.
Start with the pose, because it is the whole card. Nishida did not stand the Pokemon up and light it nicely. She drew it falling. The body arcs across the top of the frame with the hind legs up at the right, the spine curled, the split tail sweeping down and around, and the head dropping to the lower left. The head is rotated so far that the forehead jewel, that red sphere every Espeon wears above its eyes, ends up sitting between them instead. Your brain takes a second to assemble the animal, and that second is the point.
Then the eyes. A normal Espeon has large purple eyes with white pupils. These are flat dark voids with a single white highlight each, no iris, no warmth. Nothing else about the creature has been monsterified. There are no scars, no fangs, no evil grin. One anatomical detail got turned off and the whole character changes, which is a far more unsettling choice than drawing a snarl.
The colour does the rest. The body is pale lilac going nearly white where the light catches it, with pink along the ears and legs and cold blue shading underneath. It floats in a flat purple black field with no horizon and no ground, printed over cosmos foil so the background is scattered with hexagonal glitter in blue and magenta. The card reads as deep space. Espeon is the Sun Pokemon, and Nishida put it somewhere with no sun at all.
Bulbapedia's illustrator profile describes her technique as airbrush work with a soft palette and light used to pick out key areas, which is exactly right and exactly what makes this card strange. The brushwork is still gentle. The subject is not. She did eight cards in Neo Destiny, and six of them are Light Pokemon: Light Arcanine, Light Dragonite, Light Dragonair, Light Flareon, Light Golduck, plus a plain Growlithe. The other two are Dark Feraligatr and this. The artist Pokemon fans know for warmth drew the set's one corrupted Eeveelution.
Remember what a 2002 holo had to work with. No full art, no illustration rare, no special illustration rare. The painting sits inside a small rectangular window maybe a third of the card's height, with HP and attack text crowding it on every side. Modern alt art gets the entire surface. Nishida got a box, and solved it by filling that box with a single falling shape instead of a scene.
Why it is trending
PokeBeach reported the Santa Cruz x Pokemon TCG collaboration on October 6, 2026. The decks launch worldwide on Saturday October 17 at 9am ET, 30 designs plus 3 glitter gold foil chase decks limited to 500 copies each. Every one ships in a sealed blind bag with a Player's Guide booklet, so you cannot pick your design, and each deck is 8 inches by 31.6 inches with a sheen finish over the graphic. Santa Cruz last worked with Pokemon in 2023, but that run used Pokemon characters on Santa Cruz graphics. This is the first time the actual card art has been licensed onto a deck.
The 30 cards run from the 1999 Base Set through to Iono's Bellibolt ex. Eevee and all eight of its evolutions are in there. Looking at the official product photo of the Flareon, Dark Espeon and Rocket's Mewtwo ex trio, the art direction is the interesting part: Flareon gets airbrushed flames, Rocket's Mewtwo ex gets black smoke, and Dark Espeon gets a pastel sky full of pink and blue clouds. Somebody at Santa Cruz looked at a card with "Dark" in its name and read it as a dream rather than a threat. They were right.
Be clear about why this card is on the list. Dark Espeon is not a tournament legend and it is not a Charizard. It is a 60 HP Stage 1 whose attacks are Gouge and Psysplash, and the Japanese printing is literally called Bad Eifie. It got picked because the picture is good. On October 14, 2026 PriceCharting listed it at $250.00 ungraded and $11,729.75 in a PSA 10, so this is not a cheap card to chase, and that page does not separate the 1st Edition print from the Unlimited one, so read both figures as a blend rather than a quote for a specific copy.
Build a binder page around it
Here is the fact that makes this a page and not just a card. Dark Espeon finished a set that had been sitting unfinished for almost two years. Dark Flareon, Dark Jolteon and Dark Vaporeon all came out in Team Rocket on April 24, 2000, all three illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita. Dark Espeon arrived in February 2002 from a different artist and closed the group at four.
It can never be five. Bulbapedia's note on the card explains that Umbreon was left out because Darkness type Pokemon could not be Dark Pokemon under the set's own rule. The Moon Pokemon was ineligible, so the Sun Pokemon is the one that went dark. Build the four card Dark Eeveelution row and the gap where Umbreon should be is permanent and worth leaving visible.
The better spread is two rows. Neo Destiny also printed Light Flareon by Nishida, Light Jolteon by Naoyo Kimura and Light Vaporeon by Kagemaru Himeno. Put the three Team Rocket Darks and Dark Espeon across the top of a nine pocket page, the three Lights underneath, and you have a light versus dark Eevee family spread where the same three Pokemon appear twice under opposite treatments and Espeon appears once, alone, on the dark side. Three of those seven are uncommons, so most of the page costs very little.
If you run the colour sort in Binder Builders instead, Dark Espeon lands in the deep purple band and is the strongest card there from the Neo era. Give it a centre pocket, because the composition is centred and off balance at the same time, and surround it with other dark field holos so the glitter reads as one continuous night. Our guide to how to organize Pokemon cards in a binder covers artist grouping and colour sorting if you are deciding between the two systems. The same set hides another quiet masterpiece in Shining Celebi, which pairs with this one far better than its price tag suggests.
The takeaway
The reason Dark Espeon is being screen printed onto plywood this Saturday is a single good decision made in 2002: turn the animal upside down, switch off its eyes, and change nothing else. That is the kind of card worth giving a centre pocket. If you want to understand why the artist pulled it off, our feature on Atsuko Nishida, the artist who designed Pikachu covers the rest of her catalog, almost all of which is much softer than this. Open the builder, start the page with the four Darks, and leave the Umbreon slot empty on purpose.
