Every so often, I hem and haw over what would make applicators desirable outside of their use for combos or breeding certain fails or pairing with the often more sought after BO bases? Then it came to me: variants of Applicator bases. The idea is broadly similar to how Primals work, in that any type of primal can produce the smilus or felis or primal fang variant. But, there'd be some differences too. Let's pick a random applicator to demonstrate how a Variant would work....I like Demiurge!

Variant Demiurge would only be able to be bred from Applicator Demiurge or an existing Variant Demiurge. On successful Demiurge pass, there would be a 80% chance of the base applicator passing itself as normal, but a 20% chance of it passing Variant Demiurge instead.

Demiurge would show up as Black Medium Solid Special as normal and the variation would show up as Black Medium Solid Variant. Variants would have a slightly higher chance to pass themselves, at 30% chance vs the applicator's 20%.

I don't have any visuals at the moment, but imagine two Silver Bengals or maybe two Lynx Point Bengal cats. Though they may fall underneath the same color, the actual coat pattern is noticeably different, enough that the individuals can be told apart but similar that there would be no need to claim they were different colors.

More ideas that could be implemented would be Month Specific Variants or Season specific.

For example, an Ice born during August might be called a Meltwater (Ice). A Demiurge born in June might be called Heresiarch (Demiurge). Any of the June bases born in July might be called Titanomachy (Moonstone/Meteorite/). October bases born in February may be called Desire (Inferno), Amour (Blazing), Obsession (Bloodbourne), Lovestruck (Unholy), ect. I'm sure you get the gist; the theme of the month is combined with the name of the base, to produce the name of the Month variant. Month variants can pass themselves without needing to bred to another of the same kind, making them more accessible than month locked combos.