Great blade from Xiom! Great design, from the the word go. Nice innovative package, inside there is a sand stick. You can use it but ever so slightly on the edges and its perfect. In addition to that, you get two nice sticky foils that are better quality then usual, so you can use it later on as protection for the rubbers. All this seemingly small things adds up into overall premium feel of this product.Blade itself has slightly bigger head size 157mm x 152mm, but not to worry because balance of the blade is great . Average weight is around 85g, mine is 87g. Flared handle is perfect, smooth, and really nice fit, and after many different blades by many different brands, this one is best so far in my opinion. Outside layer is Limba wood, which is soft type of wood. Somewhere in between very of soft Hinoki wood and much harder Koto wood. Then very thin layer of Zephylium & X-Carbon.Playing characteristics are amazing. Blade has that woody feel in net play, but really gears up quickly when power is applied. This blade has many gears indeed. I would rate it pure OFF in terms of speed. Blade is stiff enough to block very effectively active or passive, but still flex enough to produce heavy spin. But the best thing about this blade is the control! Every single shot no matter how difficult it is can be executed with great precision. I've paired it with Dignics 05 on my bh, and with Evolution MXP on my fh, both in maximum thickness of the sponge. Blade has medium arc, and great synergy with harder rubbers, 45' ESN and up. I find to be poor combination with softer rubbers, and trying to combine it like that can give you wrong impression of the blade. One more thing that can be misleading is unique feel of this blade, it is very different from probably any other blade, my guess is because of unusual patented Zephylium fiber. But once you adopt to it, it becomes nothing short of amazing .Xiom put a lot of effort in this blade, from quality of materials and design features, to craftmanship.As far as I can see it, only problem with this blade is that Xiom has discontinued its production, without adequate successor. If you are creative offensive player, if you love variant rich game, then this blade is a dream come true. Hope my review helps to shine a little bit of lite on to this not so mainstream blade! Enjoy your game!
Only bad thing ... it is discontinued, so i am looking for a similar blade now.
Going to try the V6 from Friendship, it has a similar composition so i am hoping for the best.