Simple WildCard Player

Wildcards are an old idea that most people who started with ComfyUI never learned. The classic A1111 trick: write a prompt where a slot is {brown|blonde|black} hair, and each run picks a random value. Done right it's how you batch 32 images of the same character across different hair, outfits, poses and lighting without hand-editing anything. SimpleWildCardPlayer is this pack's dead-simple take on that, with a twist: it's fully deterministic.

How it works

The node keeps its wildcard pools as plain .txt files inside the pack's own wildcard/basic/ folder - one file per attribute, one entry per line. You list which files to draw from in the wildcard_files input (comma-separated, no .txt extension). For each item in the list, the node picks one random line from that file and appends it to your basic_prompt, comma-separated.

The determinism comes from the seed math: each batch slot uses Random(seed + i). So batch_count: 8 with seed: 42 always produces the same 8 prompts, every run. Set the seed, hit generate, and you can iterate on a character without the prompt roulette.

The inputs that matter

• basic_prompt - your fixed base prompt. The default is a long booru-tag-style 1girl prompt with quality tags, which tells you exactly what this pack was built for.
• wildcard_template - dropdown of subfolders under wildcard/ (currently just basic).
• wildcard_files - which pools to draw from. The default pulls 35 of them: age, face, bodytype, expression, eyecolor, hair, clothes, pose, light, background, and more.
• batch_count - how many prompts to emit (1–1000).
• seed - reproducibility.

Output is a single prompt_list (STRING list) - feed it into a batch loop or any node that consumes a list of prompts.

Where it fits, and where it doesn't

This is the "curated pick-list" flavor of wildcard, not full dynamic-prompt syntax. You can't write {a|b} inline anywhere in the prompt, and there's no __folder__/__subfolder__ expansion. If you want that, install a dedicated dynamic-prompts node instead - those are heavier, though, with their own dependencies. SimpleWildCardPlayer has zero: it's pure Python random plus reading text files, so it won't fight your install.

What it trades for simplicity is control. Your pools are the pack's files, so adding your own categories means editing text files inside the pack's install directory (ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-ListHelper/wildcard/basic/) - one entry per line, restart not required but file names must match exactly. A missing file doesn't error; it logs a warning in the console and silently skips that category. That silence is the one real trap - check the console if a category stops showing up.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/dseditor/ComfyUI-ListHelper

Restart ComfyUI, or search "ComfyUI-ListHelper" in ComfyUI Manager. No extra Python packages. It's a niche tool built around one specific anime-tag character workflow, but if that's your workflow it's the simplest deterministic way to batch character variety there is.