CLIPTextEncodeWildcards

This is the node most people who installed this pack actually use: a drop-in replacement for ComfyUI's stock CLIPTextEncode that expands wildcards before encoding. You type a {blonde|brunette|redhead} girl, __outfit__, __location__ into the multiline text box, and what reaches the sampler is one randomly-drawn concrete prompt. No separate text node, no rerouting - it just works where the plain encoder used to be.

The honest pitch: if you're building a batch workflow that should produce variety instead of 20 near-identical images, this is the single node that gets you there. The wider trend in 2026 is that new models take plain sentences, not comma-separated booru tags - but wildcard variety is model-agnostic. It randomizes whatever the encoder eats, CLIP-token model or not.

How it works

Mechanically it's boring in the best way. The node runs the pack's wildcards.run(text) on your prompt, then calls clip.encode() on the result and returns standard CONDITIONING - one output, wired straight into the positive (or negative) slot of any KSampler. The engine reads its cards from a wildcards folder at your ComfyUI root; each .txt file is a list of options, __name__ picks a random line, {a|b|c} picks a random option, and {2$$a|b|c} picks two. Comment lines starting with # are skipped.

The inputs are exactly two: text (multiline) and clip. Notice what's missing: there's no seed on this variant. Expansion follows ComfyUI's global random state, and because ComfyUI caches unchanged inputs, re-queueing the identical prompt does not re-roll - you have to edit the text or use the seed-carrying siblings. If you want a reproducible draw, that's literally what the pack made CLIPTextEncodeWildcards2 for (same node, adds a seed input), and CLIPTextEncodeWildcards3 bundles positive and negative into one node with a single seed.

Install and issues

Install is the standard clone-and-restart, and ComfyUI Manager finds it by searching "Lilly":

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lilly1987/ComfyUI_node_Lilly

Restart ComfyUI after cloning. No model files to fetch; the pack auto-installs rich and chardet on first load and then floods your console with colored debug logs - harmless, just noisy.

Troubleshooting, grounded in what actually trips people up: if your wildcard file isn't being picked up, it's usually the folder location - ComfyUI/wildcards/, one level above custom_nodes, not inside the node's own folder. If the same expansion repeats run after run, that's the input-caching behavior, not a bug in the engine. And a fair warning: this pack is unmaintained, and the author now points everyone at Impact Pack's wildcard node. It still runs fine for the SD 1.5 / SDXL workflows of that era, but for new graphs the maintained alternatives are the better long-term bet.