Simple Wildcard Picker

{red|blue|green} car - if you've spent any time in prompt-engineering threads you've seen this syntax before, usually credited to Impact Pack, which is where most of the ComfyUI ecosystem quietly gets its {a|b|c} wildcard expansion and __wildcard__ file support without realizing it. Simple Wildcard Picker does the narrower version of that same job: it expands {a|b|c}-style choices inside a prompt string, seeded so the same seed always picks the same options. If you don't want to pull in a heavyweight pack just to randomize a car color or a lighting condition across a batch, this is the lightweight alternative.

How it works. You write a prompt string containing one or more {option one|option two|option three} blocks, anywhere in the text. The node scans for those blocks - including nested ones, so {a {red|blue}|b} resolves correctly - and replaces each with one randomly chosen option, using a Random(seed) instance so the same seed always reproduces the same picks. That's the entire trick: same seed in, same expanded prompt out, every time. Bump the seed and you get a different combination.

The inputs and output. prompt is your multiline template with the {a|b|c} blocks embedded. seed is the integer that determines which options get picked - wire it to the same seed you're using for your KSampler if you want the wildcard choices to vary in lockstep with the image seed, or keep it separate if you want to hold the prompt combination fixed while you explore sampler seeds independently. The single output, Prompt String, is the fully expanded text - plug it straight into a CLIPTextEncode or wherever your prompt normally goes.

Worth knowing if you poke at the pack's source: this is the one node in comfyui_gr85 that's been migrated to ComfyUI's newer schema-based node API (io.ComfyNode / define_schema), while the rest of the pack still uses the classic INPUT_TYPES style. That's an internal implementation detail - the node ID (GR85_SimpleWildcardPicker) and behavior are unchanged - but it does mean this node needs a ComfyUI build recent enough to support the newer node-registration API. If you're running a genuinely old ComfyUI install and this one node (and only this one) fails to load while the rest of the pack works fine, that's the likely reason - update ComfyUI.

Installing it. Search "comfyui_gr85" in ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/veighnsche/comfyui_gr85

Restart ComfyUI. No model downloads, no heavy dependencies - it's string manipulation.

Common issues. Unbalanced braces are the usual trap with any {a|b|c} syntax - if you forget a closing } or mismatch nesting, the expansion can come out wrong or leave literal braces in your final prompt. Wire the output into a GR85_ShowText node (from the same pack) while you're building a template so you can actually see what got expanded before you burn a generation on it. And remember this only handles {a|b|c} inline choices - it doesn't read __wildcard__ files the way Impact Pack's wildcard nodes do, so if you were expecting file-based wildcard libraries, you want a different node for that.