Why SixPrizes Hated Me Circa 2011

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

--

Galvantula is for Losers

On September 9th, 2011, an article called Galvantula is for Losers was released on SixPrizes.com. For over ten years, SixPrizes has been an article site with Pokemon articles that are generally worth reading. However, Galvantula is for Losers was not a very good article. It was an article which satirically proposed that Joltik BLW was a strong card. In reality, Joltik was very weak.

Who wrote this article? Why was this article written? Why was this article released?

I wrote this article. I wrote it in a bid to earn a free one-month subscription to the paid service SixPrizes: Underground. Adam chose to publish it. The comments section hated it. Those comments made me feel bad, but I did end up getting my free month of Underground in the end! I am going to walk through my inspiration for this article, the jokes I made about Joltik in 2011, and the resulting comments.

Inspiration: Sea Blaster

In December of 2010, Travis Yeary released a satirical article on SixPrizes called, The Deck to Win Worlds: Sea Blaster!. The premise of the article is that the author created a deck with many weak basics without including their Stage 1s or Stage 2s. The deck did not include any trainers, and was more than half made up of basic energy cards.

The article goes over the cards in the decks and then a couple of matchups. It is well-written, short, and to-the-point. The comments section was generally receptive, with comments such as, “I vote this for article of the year. :P” and “Best Article of 2010”. One commenter complained and in responded many people rallied to defend the author in the comment replies. Long story short; people liked Sea Blaster

Why I Wrote Galvantula is for Losers

Me in 2011

SixPrizes originally was made up of free articles, but they launched paid articles in 2010. I was in high school and did not have any income or access to a credit card. The concept of Underground made me very jealous, as my parents would not pay for it (and it was expensive!). However, each month, readers could vote on their favorite authors of free articles, and the top twenty five voted people would get a one month subscription to Underground.

This was pretty clever. This was a good way to “compensate” and incentivize people to write free articles; they could win something of value! Also, there was the potential for 6P to turn those one month trials into paid subscriptions.

As I was only fourteen years old, I didn’t feel like I had the skills or knowledge to write a good enough serious article in order to get voted into the top 25. I had previously written a tournament report and deck analysis, but it wasn’t good enough. So I drew up a satirical article about Joltik.

Joltik BLW

There were two Joltiks in the Black and White base set. One had 30 HP and the other had 40 HP, so they were both really weak. They both served to evolve into Galvantula BLW, which was not and never has been playable. To me, this made the concept of promoting Joltik itself as being good hilarious, as it didn’t even evolve into a good card.

“That means you can withstand several Glide attacks from Zubat UL”

Zubat was a card that hit for 10 damage. Even though Joltik could withstand two to three hits from Zubat without being knocked out, that was not impressive as you could say that about literally any card in the format.

Healing

My next joke was that you could run Joltik in a healing deck with Potion, Moomoo Milk, Life Herb, and Junk Arm (to reuse the first three). The healing stuff really cracked me up as I was writing it because you wouldn’t expect Joltik to withstand even one hit in order to heal it. I continued the joke by suggesting adding 4-4-4 lines (which were especially thick at the time) of Serperior and Bellossom, which would take a lot of effort to get out.

I also suggested Max Potion and Blissey Prime. These are cards which heal all damage from a Pokemon. With Joltik having only 30 or 40 HP, these would only be healing twenty or thirty damage, which would be a gross misuse of these cards.

Damage

From there, I pivoted into jokes surrounding Joltik’s damage output. I drew up a skeleton list with 4 Joltik, 4 PlusPower, and 4 Black Belt. Joltik only hit for ten damage, so naturally he would need damage modifiers. As techs I suggested a 4-4-4 line of Kingdra Prime (which again was a comically thick line), along with Good Rod and Recycle to reuse PlusPowers.

Disruption

"If I were to actually test this, I... would add in 5 more lightning energy"

One of the Joltik’s paralyzed with a coin flip. So I suggested a “Disruption Joltik” list that ran item lock Vileplume, Weavile, Slowking, Judge, and Team Rocket’s Trickery. These were all genuinely good disruption cards, but one would never include Joltik in a deck along with them.

Joltik gets lonely

I did a bit where I said “Joltik gets lonely” and proposed a deck list with Joltiks, some evolutions (without their basics), and some legend halves (without their other halves). If one were to actually build this deck, the evolutions and legend halves would be dead cards, since they can’t be played without their counterparts. In retrospect, this is possibly the least clever joke, since it has nothing to do with Joltik. The joke is just, “what if I played a Stage 1 without the basic?”

Reactions

These comments made me feel bad. I wanted to be funny. I wanted people to like my article. The top comment shows as “Anonymous”, but I believe that at the time the author was shown to be J-Wittz. Between J-Wittz and Baby Mario, I felt like some of my game role models didn’t like my article, and that hurt my self-esteem.

Some people did think it was funny, which made me feel a bit better.

Garrett was confused, so I felt the need to reply to him and also add the above comment:

There’s nothing better than explaining the joke 😶

I got my free month of UG

When the end-of-the-month writer’s poll rolled around, I got voted 17th for the month and ended in the top 25. I then had access to SixPrizes underground, which I was able to use to reach top cut for the first time at Fall Regionals. So it ended up being all worth it. In addition, we can now point to Galvantula is for Losers as one of SixPrizes peaks in terms of quality. I guarantee that from now until at least a few months from now, no article on SixPrizes will be printed above the quality of Galvantula is for Losers.

There actually ended up being a good Joltik three years later

In XY: Phantom Forces, Joltik was printed with the Night March attack. It was actually playable, and saw play for years in both Standard and Expanded. The existence of Night March Joltik makes the concept of a competitive Joltik less funny, since it’s a real thing. In addition, we got a playable Galvantula in Steam Siege as well.

Travis Yeary owes us a new deck.

In 2019, we hit eight years from when Travis Yeary (the author of Sea Blaster) wrote that comment. If anyone knows how to contact him, please reach out to me. Him and I have a lot of playtesting to do for Worlds 2021.