I've had a couple of sessions with Zyre now, 2.5mm, black.
It was too much juice for me on my usual inner-alc blade options (Andro VCI, BTY Innerforce ALC). Was workable on Xiom ZL Pro. Tried it tonight on a Ma Lin Carbon, and that's the best fit for me. I wouldn't want to go any slower on the blade side, and the combination was good for me there.
It's a hard one to describe because it's hard to compare with other rubbers. It has strengths - and where the rubber is good, it's
really good. It also has some unusual characteristics.
- Doesn't feel super-hard, softer than 09c overall.
- Very linear, predictable in drives but high basic speed.
- Very strong for countering. Almost auto-pilot levels of ease there. My normal quick counter was like a laser AND seemed to carry oddly high spin. This part was a lot of fun - short spin-blocks were hilariously good.
- I was worried about opening up against backspin but it's great there.
- Not much "give" in the short game, and feel is unusual. Have to be active with pushing. Passive play was a complete mess. This is where I struggle the most with it, bear in mind my very average local league level here. If you have a properly developed short game then I don't think you'll have much issue really. The blade changes helped a lot here to make sense of it.
- I wouldn't want to spend money on trying the 2.7mm out.
- Fast. I'd have to slow my blade down to use it competitively.
Beyond that - there were a few other oddities. For my stroke, drives were pretty medium-low arc. Then stronger loops would have almost the same arc, but would have very, very high spin and would jump forward off the bounce. Very hard for the opponent to read - the arc didn't give the level of spin away, a bit chinese rubber vibe. But then slower, brushier loops would be fairly high arc (not as high as 09c, but still high). It gave an output that was hard to relate to other rubbers to be honest, pretty unique. I get the comparisons to T05 Hard - I think Zyre is stronger in many areas and easier to use at times.
There were times when I was going loop-loop and I'd be confident and in a flow but the ball would just go 2 feet long sometimes. I think this would need time to get used to when the sponge is fully "on". And sometimes I'd fire a loop drive in that shocked me with the speed and the returned block was faster than I expected. You'd get used to this kind of stuff over time I'm sure.
After 6 hours it still looks new, which is also very impressive.
Edit - just realised this was my 1000th post, and I feel bad for wasting it on a Butterfly rubber ;-)
