Our Nuzlocke history piece covered where the format came from and gave the Wedlocke its own section, and What Is Ironmon? went deep on the randomizer-adjacent branch of the family. That still leaves most of the actual variant list untouched. Here's the rest of it.

Wonderlocke. The catching rule gets replaced entirely: instead of catching the first wild Pokemon in an area, you send it into Wonder Trade and use whatever comes back instead. Most players add a level-restriction clause on top, since Wonder Trade can hand back something wildly over or under-leveled for where you are in the game; if the returned Pokemon is more than a set number of levels off, you trade again until you get something reasonable. It turns route-by-route planning into a genuine gamble, since you have no control over species, and it depends on Wonder Trade actually being populated, which rules it out for older games without online infrastructure.

Egglocke. Same idea as Wonderlocke, but with eggs instead of finished Pokemon. Rather than catching or trading for something you can see, you receive a random egg for each area and don't find out what's inside until it hatches. Since there's no built-in way to receive a random egg from a stranger the way Wonder Trade works, Egglockes are usually run with help: a friend, a Discord server, or a streaming chat picks the egg's contents behind the scenes, sometimes using tools built for exactly this.

Soul-Link. A two-player format where two separate save files run in parallel, linked Pokemon by Pokemon. The first Pokemon caught on each file are linked to each other, the second pair are linked, and so on down the line. If one half of a linked pair faints, its partner on the other save is treated as dead too, whether or not it's actually taken any damage. It turns a solo challenge into something closer to co-op, since a bad encounter on one player's file can cost the other player a Pokemon they never even risked in battle.

Hatelocke. Takes the standard Dupes Clause, no catching two Pokemon from the same evolutionary line, and stretches it across an entire generation, or in more extreme runs, an entire multi-game series. Once a species has been used anywhere in the run, it's off the table for every game that follows. The name comes from just how punishing that gets by the fourth or fifth game in a series, when most of the convenient, reliable early-game options are already spent.

Monolocke. Restricts the whole run to a single type. Every Pokemon caught has to share one type with the rest of the team, which usually means passing on a lot of first-encounter Pokemon that don't fit and either skipping that area's catch entirely or bending the encounter rule to compensate. It's less a variant of the catching rule and more a deliberate difficulty and theme constraint layered on top of a standard run.

Giftlocke. Restricts the roster to starters and gift Pokemon only, no wild encounters at all. Since most games only hand out a handful of gift Pokemon across an entire playthrough, this one forces a tiny, fixed roster and a lot of creative team-building around whatever a given game happens to give away for free.

None of these have the kind of single clear origin story the base Nuzlocke or the Wedlocke do; they're mostly community-evolved, showing up on forums and wikis like Nuzlocke University and spreading from streamer to streamer rather than tracing back to one comic or one creator. That's arguably the more accurate picture of where the format has been heading for over a decade now: less a fixed ruleset and more a shared toolkit that anyone can remix.

Sources for this piece: Nuzlocke University, Digital Trends, and Bulbapedia.