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!
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.
❌ - 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
The Donor Figure - Ember and Somnambulist's Functional Heartbreaker
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.
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.
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 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.
Heartbreaker Buckshot - Official Art
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.
Nothing else to it, just a drawing of my Chill design I did at work, a couple of frozen enemies in the background and the city in the back was last minute addition to make it seem more interesting, not based on anything in particular from Skylanders or the ice environments we’ve seen.
I’m so happy with how the lineart came out, I genuinely feel like this is one of my best, especially with the hard shading around the upper body/head.
Tried something different with the ice, whilst looking for reference I found photos of ice creating rainbows when hit by light, I liked how it looked and thought it was beautiful so I wanted to try that out, definitely need to do more testing and practice but I’m pretty happy with a first attempt, I think the ice she’s walking on came out the best though.
Art Critique:
Arms are a bit weird and the eyes are slightly off, but thats really it, i think i did pretty well.
Decided to paint some of my extra portals, I wanna do this again but make them the legendary color scheme. When I get an extra swap portal I'll paint that black and silver too.
Hello again. It's been another while, I will say, but I got two more OC Skylanders I like to reveal. Again these are not the best drawings because I am not an artist
The first is my own Trap Master of the dark element! Her name is Torriku. She is a hybrid of a Kitsune and a Tanuki. She can shapeshift, make illusions and she wields a Traptanium Katana.
Second to last is my light core OC, Tesla-ceratops. She's a Triceratops (like Tri Tip), and she wields a set of Tekko Kagi that are imbued with bio electric energy that she can charge up to become more faster.
So yeah, just wanted to get that out the way, while I'm still developing Skylanders Eclipse.
J’envisage de me lancer dans l’aventure Skylanders sur Xbox 360 (je ne connais la franchise que de nom). Je possède déjà les jeux et 2-3 portails, mais aucune figurine.
Mon objectif : faire l’histoire complète ainsi que tous les succès, le tout d’une traite.
Y a-t-il des personnes qui y ont déjà joué ? Quelles figurines faut-il avoir selon les chapitres ? Vu le nombre de figurines et surtout leurs prix, j’imagine qu’une figurine de chaque élément suffirait, mais je ne suis pas sûr. Rien que pour Spyro, j’ai cru en voir une trentaine.
Didn't realize that today is the 14th Ann for Skylanders Giants so here's to celebrating another year.
Wanted to share another piece made by my friend of my OC Victoria (My OC) absolutely clobbering Robo Kaos. I think he did a great job with both characters. Just a fun piece but I don't currently have any major story ideas to put her into the Skylands. She's from another world but will always fight for those in need.
Also on a normal 1 on 1 she'd probably lose just because of his larger size, more durable armor and magical abilities, but I might try designing her as a Skylander cause she has some neat tricks up her sleeves.
I have the original pc version portal of power and when i connected the usb to the pc it lighted up and it was detected by the game but it wasn't reading the skylander, on the screen said to put a skylander on the portal all the time, so I tried to try out drivers from zadig but it made it even worse and now the portal isn't even detected by the original pc version of the game.
Does soemone know how to fix the portal some other way?
