Spinning the Web — A First Look at Galvantula ex

Hello everyone! We’re into the beginning of the new season, and we now have our first new set of the season in Stellar Crown, a smaller set which is mostly made up of cards from Japan’s Stellar Miracle set. The release of Stellar Crown will put the Japanese and non-Japanese formats into roughly the same format, though as this has been the off-season in Japan, there are few serious events to base any results on.

It’s a new year and a relatively unexplored new set! While the set isn’t large, there are a few new cards which will find their way into existing decks, as well as a few new Pokemon which may make up brand-new archetypes. The “theme” of this set is Terapagos and stellar Pokemon, with a particular focus on Colorless Pokemon. Terapagos ex is itself a deck, thanks to the new Sky Field-like Stadium Area Zero Underdepths, and it can be played either on its own with some of the new powerful Colorless support Pokemon (like Noctowl and Bouffalant), or with Origin Forme Palkia VSTAR as a synergistic secondary attacker. The most notable new card for Colorless Pokemon is Glass Trumpet; an Item that can provide powerful Energy acceleration to Colorless Pokemon, such as Terapagos ex. All you need is a Tera Pokemon in play — which Terapagos ex is — and suddenly Colorless has among the best Energy acceleration in the game!

Here’s the thing though; Glass Trumpet’s usefulness isn’t limited to only Terapagos ex — in fact, it can work well in a variety of decks. Moreover, those decks don’t have to be Colorless-focused decks; instead, by combining Glass Trumpet with Blissey ex, you can effectively turn Glass Trumpet into Energy acceleration for any type! When Blissey ex came out in Twilight Masquerade, it seemed to be the kind of versatile card that should, at some point, find its way into the meta. Now, with Stellar Crown and the new Glass Trumpet, it should start to realize that potential. An extra couple of Energy per turn can be useful in a lot of different decks, but there is one particular new card that the new Glass Trumpet + Happy Switch combo works perfectly with, and that is Galvantula ex.

In this article, I’m going to take a look at Galvantula ex and explain how it works, why it combos so well with Glass Trumpet, and share my decklist for this new archetype.

Unlikely Friends — Galvantula ex & Blissey ex

First, let’s look a bit more at Galvantula ex. Charged Web is a rather efficient attack at two for 220, but what makes this card shine is Fulgurite. It’s been a bit since we had a strong Item lock deck in the format, and Fulgurite is one of the strongest Item-locking attacks ever. Not only does it lock your opponent out of Items on the following turn, but at 180 damage per attack, it doesn’t take long to Knock Out your opponent’s Pokemon either. Unlike something like Seismitoad-EX‘s Quaking Punch, which took a slow-and-steady approach to get KOs, Fulgurite can 2HKO just about anything in the format, including VSTARs and Stage 2 ex Pokemon. As such, you don’t need to play a ton of disrupting Trainers along with it to win — so long as you can keep using Fulgurite, you’ll be victorious before too long. Item lock is a tried and true strategy and one that has been missing from the current format for a bit now. As such, many decks are not built to withstand Item lock; on the contrary, quite a few of the top archetypes overwhelmingly rely on some Item or another. For a few examples, Regidrago VSTAR needs Energy Switch, Raging Bolt ex decks need Energy Retrieval and Earthen Vessel, Miraidon ex decks need Electric Generator, and Charizard ex decks need Rare Candy. Shut those decks off from their most important Items, and suddenly they become a lot weaker.

Of course, Fulgurite also comes with two big downsides; it takes three different Energy types to use, and you have to discard all of those Energy every time you use it. So, not only do you have to find a way to get it going in the first place, but to keep the Item lock live, you need to somehow reattach three different Energy every turn. This is where our Blissey ex combo comes in. Galvantula ex gives you the Tera Pokemon that you need to be able to use Glass Trumpet, so all you need to do to re-use Fulgurite is to attach an Energy, play a Glass Trumpet to get back the other two types, and move those Energy up with Happy Switch. This requires a little bit of setup to get to this point, but once you’re there, it’s rather easy to use Fulgurite turn after turn. In practice, it isn’t all that difficult to get to the first use of Fulgurite either, thanks to a few other tricks that this deck has up its sleeve. To explain those, let’s now take a look at the rest of the deck.

This concludes the public portion of this article.

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