Possible to play an animation over a sprite?

[Ralph]

So to preface this, I've already looked through the docs for something that could do what I want but I couldn't find anything too useful.

So I'm trying to make a sprite grow cracks over time (think like in minecraft when you mine), except I don't want to have to create a spritesheet of no cracks to cracks and have to loop it for every sprite texture. I'm looking for someway to play a standard opaque animation over each item I want cracks to form on. Is there anyway to do this?

The only method I could think of would be to at the time I want the cracks to appear, to spawn a sprite right on top of the current sprite that is just a opaque cracking animation. This would work, but creates the challenge of having to deal with these opaque cracked-animation sprites now, especially in a multiplayer settings when I'm trying to run as efficiently as possible. If it comes to it I'll use this system and figure out a way to handle them but would rather have something that I can tie to the sprite that self destroys like an animation of its texture would.

Let me know if I need to be clear, kind of rushed this. 

Thank you!