Splinterlands in all of its collectible card game glory, really only has only barely scratched the surface in terms of luxury card variants. Right now, as collectors, we have: Regular, Gold Foil, and Skin Variants. As I grow to connect with more of the art style, lore and characters I am itching to find additional variants in future releases. I follow the discord often, and try to collect (or create my own) samples of variant concepts and ideas. Above is an animated concept by Troy G of the recently spoiled new rewards card Djinn Oshannus.
It is a pretty safe bet to say that the Splinterlands devs are considering animated cards, because the art director on the last AMA showed us some animated effects similar to this Lava Launcher concept, also by Troy G. We do not know if Splinterlands is actively working on adding these effects to cards, or attempting to have in game battle animations but it is fun to speculate. Being a big fan of the stlye of artwork in Splinterlands I personally love seeing the cards come to life.
Last week I spent a little time creating a few variants that I personally would love to see included in the game like an animated Fireworks Variant of the Goblin Mech. As I mentioned in Goblin Mech Firework Variant I really like how Splinterlands has balance Gold Foils to be desireable, functional, and attractive; and now I think they should explore additional chase cards that are both easier to get and harder to get than gold foils and allow for more collecting opportunities at the same time.
In the comments of my Should Splinterlands have Superfractor Foils? I had a good discussion with 
"Maybe. That could be a cool publicity stunt, if you get ultra rare cards, that give you an extra 10% of DEC/SPS earnings and more collection power."
I thought it was a great idea and responded:
"Splinterlands has so many value pools (cards, cards levels, power, dec, potions, drop rates, lands, airdrop, sps, credits, guild stats, rewards chests, rank, etc etc) that specialty cards could impact any of these areas and be a really interesting addition to the game. I like the idea of animated foil cards to work like quest potions, for each one you have it gives you an additional potion for quests up to a certain amount, or you can delegate the foil card to a certain area to increase a certain resource you want to gain."
And it brings up the question, what effects could ultra rare specialty Splintercards cards do?
Here are my current top 5:
- If you own a Superfractor of a particular Splinter, then you get double the cards from that splinter in future packs from that particular set.
- A wildcard rainbow variant that once per seasons lets you play the card in a random shard slot.
- A variant that comes fully upgraded to max (perhaps only 10 of each in existence)
- A variant that gives you an extra daily rewards chest
- A variant that could transform into a title card. If you win a tournament with the variant card it gets imprinted with an achievement and boost collection score.