Substitute Amiibo Cards

On Friday I talked about the process of summoning an Amiibo Figure or an Amiibo Card to your Island. Over the years Nintendo has released a large number of limited edition Amiibo products associated with Animal Crossing. The products compatible with New Horizons are numerous but as far as I can tell you have the following to choose from.

• Animal Crossing Amiibo Series – Cannot be invited to Campground
• Villager SSB Amiibo – Cannot be invited to Campground
• Isabelle SSB Amiibo – Cannot be invited to Campground
• Animal Crossing Amiibo Cards (4 series of 100 cards) – Most animals can be invited with some exceptions
• Animal Crossing Welcome Amiibo Cards (50 Cards) – I believe all can be invited to Campground.
• Animal Crossing Welcome Sanrio Amiibo Cards (6 cards) – None of these are compatible

So for the purpose of inviting Villagers you have 450 cards and of those a number are characters like Isabelle, Tom Nook and the Nooklings that are not available for inviting to the Campground. The general animals like the ones shown above however can be. Side note… there is overlap between the Welcome and the 400 card series so for the sake of our purposes I am generally going to focus on the four series of cards that came out in 2015-2016 and are now exceptionally hard to find except for on the after market.

The problem with Nintendo and Amiibo products is there is a built in rarity to them. Generally speaking they have only one print run and when that is sold out they are gone other than purchasing from collectors or folks looking to flip product. Were they simply a collectible this would be perfectly fine, but the problem I personally have with them is that they also serve interesting in game functionality with specific titles. The challenge is that a lot of these cards are rather pricey in third party markets like Ebay. For example here are some prices for Cherry the dog, one of the Amiibos that I wanted to invite to my island. The prices vary wildly for authentic cards, and even more if you are hunting for a card that has never been scanned or associated with a system already. So if you were to say you could pick up the cards for an average price of $20 per animal… and say there are only 350 usable animals in the 400 card set. It would be rather expensive to pick up a full series run if that was what you are after.

If you were wanting to pick up the original packs of cards from the various 4 release series, they seem to be going for around $20 for each pack of 6 cards. As a result of these prices you will see replica cards available on grey markets like Etsy that look and function exactly like the real thing. They still are not exceptionally cheap and if you want to pick up a full series run you are still likely going to be paying a minimum of $2 per card with the cheapest I have seen a full set being around $600. For some reason Etsy seems to think I want prices in Euros, but you can do the conversion math yourself. At this point you might be asking yourself… how exactly can they replicate an amiibo card and get it to work perfectly with Nintendo games? Now we get into the meat of why I am posting today.

Amiibos operate on a technology called NFC or Near Field Communication. This operates in two varieties.. active NFC like that of your smart phone or passive NFC like that of a tap to pay credit card. Amiibos operate on the later of these two and as such require no power and also never stop working because they are relying on the reader device to supply an electromagnetic current which causes the device to spring to life and respond. This is also why when you hold an Amiibo to scan it, it takes a second or two before it gets a read. Amiibos more specifically work on a format known as NTAG215 which is an open standard, and as a result you can effectively take ANY NTAG215 compliant NFC card and write an Amiibo’s image to it. The above is a picture of some various form factors available on AliExpress the most common being the “Proximity Card” similar to your Employee ID card that lets you into buildings, and the sticker which can be adhered to anything giving you NFC functionality. Generally speaking it is around $15 for 50 NFC Proximity Cards and the price goes down significantly as you buy in bulk.

There is a piece of software called TagMo available on Android phones that allows you to use the built in NFC functionality of your device and use it to scan Amiibos, save off the information from them, and then write all of that information to a new blank NFC NTAG215 card or sticker. I took a few screenshots of the app after launching, the app searching for a tag to load and then the app with Al’s card image loaded in. From there I could very easily take a blank card and write Al’s data to it, effectively creating my own Amiibo Card that works as any other Amiibo Card in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Effectively this is what all of those sellers on Ebay or Etsy do to create their “replica” cards. In fact the Legend of Zelda series of Amiibos were so popular that Chinese factories were churning out really professional looking mini-cards that allowed you to carry the entire series run of figures in a form factor roughly as large as a pack of chewing gum. If Animal Crossing New Horizon maintains its popularity, I figure in the future something like that will probably be available here as well.

In the meantime however I have crafted a few cards for the Villagers I am interested in inviting. There are archives online that have dumps of the data from the Amiibo cards. TagMo is readily available through the GitHub archive, but in order to get it to work you need a few bits of data in order to successfully write the cards. There is a reddit thread out there with information on how to get that set up, and where to find the important bits of data. All of these things combined and an Android 5.0 or higher device with NFC functionality… and you can write your own Amiibo Cards. Generally speaking the NFC cards can be written to once and then are effectively read only after that point. However there are a few third party devices out there like the Amiiqo which serve as an NFC tag emulator, allowing you to swap between Amiibo Images on the fly. These however generally run around $100 for the Amiiqo itself and the reader capable of writing data to it.

Of course none of this would be needed if there were not the built in scarcity of Amiibo products. If you could reasonably go purchase a brand new Amiibo at the normal $10-15 price you can find them for new in the store or on online retailers, it is unlikely that faking amiibos would have become quite so rampant. Once a series run is no longer available on the open market, you are effectively forced to pay collectors prices for them. I personally don’t care about the collectibility aspect, I just want the in game functionality. Essentially in the games that support them, Amiibos are like having DLC that only a handful of people can realistically acquire. So for the time being I will continue to fake out Amiibos, and now you have all of the knowledge needed to do it as well. Unfortunately iPhone users, to the best of my knowledge there is no equivalent of TagMo since iOS only allows reading tags not writing them.