They are separate, TCG is mostly inspired by the videogame, but not by the anime... "Pokémon Center Lady" (not "Nurse Joy") is looking at us.
The video games sometimes take inspiration from the animation (
Pokémon Yellow, anyone?); yes, that which they inspired sometimes inspires them. Some of the decisions with the TCG seem at least potentially inspired by them as well. Pokémon is a multi-media franchise; past experience with both Pokémon and other such things has taught me that while some things have much more influence than others, it isn't always a one-way street.
Now, does that mean the animation affects the TCG? I'm not sure; a lot of art from (especially) the early games gets tweaked for the animation and which the TCG aligns with seems to vary. Of course some of it might be a lack of data:
Copycat has had at least four major printings and the art is different between the oldest two and the two most recent. Said older versions have a green haired Trainer that looks very much like the animation's character "Duplica". Unfortunately I can only find her over world sprite for Gen 1 games, and while it is so simple that either the animation or the TCG may have interpreted it as Duplica's animation model, the idea that both did so separately is highly improbable. Now if her Trainer "battle" sprite looks exactly like that... well I'm wrong. My Google Fu failed me and I couldn't find said image. I think I found every
other Trainer's look in the game except hers. @_@
Changing gyarados to dark would mean you wouldn't need water energies. BUT we have quagsire and friends, but they don't switch energy cost from fighting to water, it is always water
TCG adaptations of video game dual-Type Pokémon can use either, both or neither Energy-Type matching the TCG equivalent of their video game Types. I'm not even sure if recent cards have followed a hard and fast pattern that we ought to be using them for firm predictions. Educated guesses, certainly, but not really concrete points upon which an argument can rest. Also, it will be kind of funny if
Gyarados ends up being a Colorless-Type.
Which is not the same as
Scyther EX (or as the official stuff seems to put them,
Scyther-ex and
Scyther-EX). No, I'm not sure why the hyphen gets added and I may be mistaken for
Scyther-ex, but you'll see even in game text (like on
Spirit Link) cards that the Mega Evolutions are "M ______-EX" with the hyphen before the "EX" even though the name text on the actual card has no hyphen. @_@
Anyway, we got a
Scyther-ex and later a
Rocket's Scyther-ex due to peculiarities in the game: cards that were originally Basics without Evolutions and/or homaging older versions of them, I believe.