While there are many opinions regarding the ongoing challenges of successfully collecting amiibo, the continually expanding range - there'll even be a Chibi-Robo figurine - suggests that it's a major part of Nintendo's plans. The possibilities for expansion are certainly vast.

Clues to Nintendo's intentions can be found in various ways, meanwhile, and Redditer ZoomBoppo has found something interesting by apparently digging into the coding of amiibo - naturally a serving of salt is recommended, but it's an interesting read.

In a post on the amiibo sub-reddit, the idea of mining the NFC chips of individual figures for their data has produced a pattern that could potentially have tipped Nintendo's hand. ZoomBoppo explains:

So every amiibo character has an 8-byte identification on pages 21 and 22 of the NFC chip. This info contains the general character on page 21 (ie. SSB Mario, SMB Mario, and Golden Mario all have the same page 21), and the print number on page 22 (basically sorted by the number that appears on the upper-right of EU packaging).

Here's an example of Mario's page 21. 00 00 00 00 Simple, right? Here's Luigi and Peach. 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 Now take Pit: 07 40 00 00 It appears that the first byte as well as the leading 4 bits of the second byte define what game series the character belongs to, while the trailing 4 bits define the specific character. 000_ is the Mario series; 074_ is the Kid Icarus series.

Using this as a starting point, a comparison was made between various series and their characters. Among the findings?

Here's another interesting case, Rosalina & Luma: 00 04 01 00 Rosalina & Luma is defined as the second version of the Rosalina character with this third byte, meaning an amiibo of Rosalina alone is very possible.

Although the writer reserved scepticism, this would stand to reason given what we think we know about the Mario Party 10-related amiibo.

And within all of the speculation, the following implication may be a dream come true, or a wallet destructive nightmare:

The Pokemon characters also don't follow this ID convention as strictly. Below are the Pokemon in the order Charizard, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Lucario, Greninja:

19 06 00 00 19 19 00 00 19 27 00 00 1a c0 00 00 1b 92 00 00 It would appear from the previous findings that these characters are all from different series, but that is actually not the case. For the Pokemon, the second byte represents a simple number, and the first byte represents a multiple of 256 to add to that number, with 19 being 0, 1a being 1, and 1b being 2 (512). When you convert the hex to decimal and add the 256s, you get some oddly familiar numbers: 06 from hex = 6, 6 + 0 = 6 19 from hex = 25, 25 + 0 = 25 27 from hex = 39, 39 + 0 = 39 c0 from hex = 192, 192 + 256 = 448 92 from hex = 146, 146 + 512 = 658 These are the Pokemons' corresponding National Pokedex numbers. This means that there is space reserved for all 700+ Pokemon.

A conclusion naturally being drawn is that if Nintendo goes all out with 'mon amiibo, perhaps in a future game, amiibo cards would be the likely avenue as opposed to 700+ figurines.

You can read the whole of the post here. There are additional findings including the likelihood of Mii Fighter amiibo figurines, already planned Mario related series left unannounced, and the possibility for pre-planned, Nintendo related series we haven't yet heard about. While this should all be considered rumour, the financial boon of the amiibo market perhaps makes these conclusions a matter of "when", not "if".