>>535399985
I'm going to be devil's advocate here and say that there was really no other option.
They wanted a reference to the anime, but the entire thing is already references to existing card arts. This puts Konami in a tight spot because you can't exactly just redraw an existing artwork for a card and reuse it because it would visually get confusing.
So smiling Ecclesia is literally the only option they had from Ep1.
I do hate it though, half-body artworks for monsters suck cock, like imagine if Dark Magician's original art was set up like that.