So I have been a fan/sucker of the NFC/Toys to Life craze since it’s rise to popularity from the original Skylanders: A Spyro’s Adventure. Sitting next to me as I write this are 250+ Skylanders, 20-30 Disney Infinity characters (the rest are in the other game room), and about a dozen of the more recent Amiibo purchases.
I love the creativity in the Skylanders characters, the nostalgia from the Amiibos, and let’s just say I have Disney Infinity (DI) characters. I’m not that big a fan of either the physical DI characters (I find the very blocky) or the game itself, yet my boys get hours and hours of amusement of mucking around in the Toy Box mode.
And now there is a fourth contender to the market (fifth or more if you include older games like ‘Funkeys’), Lego Dimensions, though the AUD entry price seems ridiculously steep ($160 for the starter pack), so it will be interesting to see how that seels.
Anyhow, I’ve found it extremely difficult to locate decent ‘collectors’ spreadsheets for these series, so I’ve compiled my own, which you can find here http://1drv.ms/1bzrztX. The Skylanders section includes all the common variants (alt deco/legendary/dark etc) that appear different in-game, as well as the special/chase variants that I own .. so it is by no means comprehensive as I only have a few chase variants.
For those interested, the terminology ‘alt deco’ is used to describe Skylanders with physically different paint work that also appear different in-game. Depending on their age, alt deco variants are usually reasonably easy to find, being exclusives in certain game edition releases or retailer exclusives i.e. they had a general retail release.
Special variants, also called chase variants, physically look different, such as a Glow in the Dark (GITD) paint jobs, are clear or crystal or are ‘flocked’ (i.e. fuzzy), yet look identical to the original characters in-game. Special/Chase Variants are usually a very limited release for special events (e.g. New York Toy-Fair, E3), or there is just as a vary rare chance that your retailer will get one (I’ve heard numbers bandied like 1 Skylander in 1,000 boxes of Skylanders). I have yet to see a chase variant in the wild, and some of them (like Pearl Hex from the 2012 Nuremberg Toy Fair) go for $500US+. As of Skylander Giants and up, most Special/Chase Variants have a tag of ‘special’ when placed on the portal, though the chase variants of the original Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure (e.g. E3 2012 Silver Spyro, Flocked Stump Smash etc) don’t have that coded into the NFC chip, so they just appear as the original characters, though they do start at level 5 with 5,000 gold from memory.
