There could have been a similar situation with the Devil card.
As I noted in one of those posts on the Tower thread, there are no surviving Devil cards from the 15th century: None of the sets of luxury hand-painted cards that survive include that trump at all. As in the case of the Tower, which is almost as rare among the cards from that time, this could have been because the image on those cards was so distressing to later owners that they separated that card from the rest of the deck and then lost it, or deliberately destroyed it.
From the 16th and 17th centuries, there are nine different surviving Devil designs. There are certain features that appear on most or all of these cards: The Devil is shown as a humanoid figure with wings, the feet of a chicken, and the horns and often also the ears of a cow. He usually also has a second face on his stomach and holds a trident.
Then there is another feature included in only four of the nine designs, but which might well have been present on the very first Devil card from which all nine are descended, if my hypothesis is correct: damned souls being tormented. These are shown on the early version of the Bolognese card (which survives in two slightly different versions, the Agnolo Hebreo card in the British Museum and the sheet in the Rothschild collection at the Louvre), the Cary Sheet, the Roman card, and the Tarot de Marseille card. (On the latter, the two damned souls have turned into minor devils, but their origin seems clear from the fact that they are both tethered by the neck to the Devil's pedestal and their hands seem bound behind their backs: they are clearly his prisoners.)
In probably all four cases, more than one damned soul was depicted on the card. There were at least three on the Cary Sheet version; the Agnolo Hebreo card also shows three, while Rothschild card and the Tarot de Marseille design both have two. About a third of the Roman card is missing; the remaining part shows one damned soul clutched in the Devil's left hand. That victim, however, does not seem to have been the main focus of the image, which was probably the Devil's face. This makes me think that the devil must have had another victim, most likely in his mouth, as on the Bolognese cards. This impression is strengthened by the fact that the visible victim appears to be female: the partial image leads you to expect a male counterpart, as on the Tarot de Marseille card.
Like the case of the devil and the falling figures on the Tower card, it's possible that the reason why more than half of those early Devil cards did not show these victims is because the sight of damned souls tormented by the devil was unsettling to the players, so the card designers removed them. We know that this removal definitely occurred in the Bolognese deck, with the older Devil card being later replaced (probably in the 17th century) by a design that showed only the Devil alone.
The hypothesis is admittedly not as strong in this case as it is for the Tower card. Images from the 14th and 15th centuries of towers being destroyed by divine lightning seem to have very rarely included a devil in or near the tower, so if one was present on Tower cards in three different tarot design lineages, that is a strong argument for one having been present on the original Tower card. Images of the Devil from that period, on the other hand, routinely showed him tormenting his human victims, and the tarot cards that show this do not even all depict it in the same way. This increases the likelihood that the feature could have been added independently by card designers in different regions.
On the other hand, however, the fact that evidence suggests that the same thing happened to the Tower card significantly supports the case for it happening to the Devil too, and vice versa: the fact that both of these cards show signs of such a development considerably strengthens the argument for it in each case.