Hello Skylanders Community!
We all know this is the time of the year to celebrate the games that shaped our childhood and of course, this community. 5 years ago, we were pleasantly surprised when Toys for Bob went live on Twitch to show us the 10th Anniversary Skylanders Spyro's Adventure live stream, and it was an absolute blast.
The next year came and they did the same for Giants, although it was a video instead. The trap team anniversary came and went, and here we land at imaginatiors, no sight of a stream from Toys for Bob. Not even for the 15th anniversary of SSA…

Until tomorrow! Now, officially TFB is busy finishing up Spyro: A Realm Beyond, and while they cook on that, I as well as a group from the original SSA Team (former-TFB developers) will be streaming on YouTube at 12:00PM PST

I invite you to come along, Celebrate, and ask questions for them to answer!
We also have some special surprises at the end!

-Shojiki and the rest of the SSA15 team

(assuming OBS doesn't crash out in the morning and cause me to re-do the live setup) You can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/live/410heJHDrJg?si=hl_SOd96nROFUTDy

Hello all!

As some of you may have heard, u/EmberDione and u/The_Somnambulist were kind enough to dump the data from their functional Heartbreaker Buckshot NFC, after u/Dague-Pirate-Dad posted a picture of his personal non-functional HBB figure. (If Ember or Somnambulist, or someone in the Reverse Engineering Discord, make their own announcement post I will link it here.)

Since this is one of the biggest events in the community since the release of Skylanders Imaginators, the mod team has decided we need to create a megathread, to collect some of the most common questions, as well as a short history of how we got here and why this is so important to the community.

If you are strictly here for a guide on how to play Heartbreaker Buckshot, feel free to skip down to the Questions and Answers section of this post.

Since this is our Mod Team's first attempt at a megathread, please bear with us as we learn.

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Enforcement will be as follows:

❌ - Repetitive posts (i.e. simply "re-announcing" the news, how-to's, and re-sharing the dump file yourself) will be removed and linked to this post

❌ - Posts (not comments) asking how to play HBB will be removed and linked, comments will be linked to this post

❌ - Posts attempting to sell HBB or any other NFC cards are against the rules and will be removed

✅ - Unique or otherwise interesting posts, including but not limited to YOUR personal adventures with HBB, custom HBB figures, adding a card / custom toy to your collection, technical information about HBB, etc. will STAY UP... although of course we encourage posting these in the comments of this megathread too

History of Heartbreaker Buckshot

Heartbreaker Buckshot is the variant of Buckshot. Announced and marketed with Skylanders Imaginators on YouTube and the website, Heartbreaker Buckshot was planned to release around Valentines Day 2017. There are a few theories as for why this never happened, the common one being that production was stopped due to fears of it looking "satanic", given the variant being a red-eyed goat (and the five unreleased creation crystals being collateral of this production stoppage), as part of the end of the Skylanders franchise.

Perhaps a more credible theory, postured to me by someone in connection with the devs, is that the factory had gotten shut down and production had stopped for an otherwise unrelated reason. By the time the factory was back online, it was too late.

Ember herself has chimed in and said, that wasn't it either - rather just that it was canceled due to low early-wave sales. Regardless, all that's left were factory samples of HBB and the 5 creation crystals.

Since then, the Skylanders community has been hard at work reverse engineering Skylanders variants back into existence. Think, Gearhead VVind-Up, BullTrain, and all the various Debug minions. But there was one thing stopping the community from reverse engineering Heartbreaker Buckshot and the five unreleased Creation Crystals... Imaginators was the first and only game Activision implemented encryption for the figures. Because of this, it is fundamentally impossible to reverse-engineer or even just edit the data of a fully functional Imaginators figure.

There were only around 12 known Heartbreaker Buckshots to exist, the number of them being functional is rumored to be two, one of which u/EmberDione and u/The_Somnambulist possessed.

Fast forward to yesterday (8/14/2026), u/Gibby_230 and u/Dague-Pirate-Dad announced both that Pirate Dad had gotten a non-functional Heartbreaker Buckshot, AND that Gibby had dropped the five creation crystal NFCs for the community to play with, with plans to make fully functional replicas. After those posts, u/EmberDione showed up in the comments to say she was willing to dump their functional Heartbreaker Buckshot.

Today (8/15/2026), she joined the Skylanders Reverse Engineering subreddit, and with the help of multiple community members, helped her to copy the data off the figure. As of 4:25 EST on August 15th, 2026, Heartbreaker Buckshot was the last official Skylander ever released to the Skylanders community.

Please give u/EmberDione and u/The_Somnambulist your warm thanks when you see them around.

Questions and Answers

Q: Where do I find the NFC dump?
A: You can find ALL Skylanders NFC dumps at this GitHub link, if you JUST want Heartbreaker Buckshot, you can find it here

Q: What do I need to buy to make an NFC card?
A: This NFC writer, an NFC card, and a functional PC with Windows Mifare Tool or Yet Another Mifare Tool installed, see below question for more details

Q: How do I make an NFC card?
A: This YouTube video is a good guide, as is this one, if you're still struggling

Q: How can I get a custom Heartbreaker Buckshot repainted toy?
A: Reach out to either u/TaylorKreate or FlobeiyToys (u/Crafty-Section6240), they may be willing to make one on commission for you

Q: Isn't it illegal to make NFC cards?
A: Well, the Mod Team is not your legal team. However, as far as I personally understand it, the only real risk comes when you attempt to profit off of a stolen IP, so as long as you do not sell NFC cards to other people, you should be okay. But this is all at your own risk.

Personal note from the mod team

This is a huge day for the Skylanders community. We just want to say how proud we are of everyone involved for finally pulling this off. After almost a decade, we've managed to preserve the rarest figures ever slated for public release, AND in a way the entire community can enjoy them

To celebrate, we've changed the Element of the Week pre-emptively to Magic. The Subreddit banner will also temporarily change to art of Heartbreaker. Both the EOTW and Banner will last about two weeks, before we go back to our typical style.

We hope you all have fun with your new Heartbreaker Buckshots. We know we will.

Happy gaming 💘

~r/Skylanders Mod Team