PopCast #26: The Ti-Vayder Awakens

I don’t know how you wanna calculate this bro. You brought it up, you tell me :joy: in this day and age the best yoyo is pure opinion

For me personally I would say the greatest yoyo of all time is the Draupnir. Not necessarily because it’s still the best performing, but because it was the final evolution of modern yoyo design. The Draupnir still stands as the standard to which all great yoyos should be compared to. So in my personal opinion I would say the Draupnir is the GOAT.

Or if you wanna buy some Speeders cuz it won worlds 3 times you can do that too :joy:

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Everyone is entitled to their (informed) optinion. I’m not informed enough so I don’t actually have an opinion on the Best Yoyo Ever Made. But when it comes to claiming there is a consensus on such a superlative, I instinctively ask how the consensus was arrived at.

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Exactly. Anyone who has known me for any length of time, knows that I have a pretty decent little collection consisting of a lot of these highly acclaimed releases.

It’s not a joke when I say that’s all of my other yoyos feel meh in comparison. It’s crazy, there’s something really special about this particular model.

Not that my opinion ought to be taken as gospel, @zslane, but it’s something to consider. it’s not that I don’t like my other yoyos anymore, it’s that there is something about this particular design that stands out from everything else I have owned and played.

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Well if you’ve played a lot of yoyos… and you think one of them performs better than every other one you’ve tried… then that’s the best yoyo to you. I’m not sure what’s so hard to understand

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It isn’t about what any one person thinks or prefers, it is about how consensus is formed. I’m not challenging anyone’s personal opinion on the matter, or even how they arrived at their opinion.

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The consensus arrived cuz a lot of people had the same opinion

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Yeah, but “a lot” is pretty vague. And who is this “lot”? I mean, I know we’re all just being casual around here when we talk about how great things are, mostly cuz we all know we’re just bandying personal opinion about, but there’s a huge gulf between perception and truth when the opinions of a relative few are expected to stand representative for the whole (which is the definition of consensus).

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When this yoyo came out there was lots of talk about it on the yoyonation forum. Many many people said it was the “best” yoyo they’d played. People (though the number is less probably due to owners of TiWalkers not posting in discussions as much as they used to) on this forum still say the same thing. I don’t know of another yoyo that ever had this many people saying it’s the “best”.

So that’s where the consensus you refer to comes from. There just isn’t another yoyo this has happened with so it can be assumed that it’s way up there near the best or actually the best.

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The Draupnir?

When I first joined these forums last summer, the Draupnir was all anyone talked about when the subject of best/most impressive/most desireable (modern) yoyo came up. The TiWalker hardly ever came up in conversation. That’s my recollection anyway.

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There has always been a few. vega and yoyodoc are two that come to mind that always bring up the tiwalker. But most of those “Best yoyo ever” threads always end up with 100 different yoyos in them :joy:

I’m really interested to see the general consensus when this release happens. That’ll really tell the tale. I’m pretty sure most are going to feel like @smileypants707 does.

But we’ll see soon enough.

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The Ti Walker is just too scarce to compare it to some things like a Northstar, Draupnir, or Chief in any tangible way.

VERY few players have Ti Walkers. They’re pretty much all in the hands of collectors and hobbyists at this point.

Also titanium yo-yos as a whole are still for the most part unused on the world stage. As far as I know (which could VERY well be wrong at this point) the Ti Walker is the only fully titanium yoyo to see the world stage past preliminary rounds.

I never designed to Ti Walker to be the “best of all time”, and I don’t think any designer goes in with that mentality. I think players and hobbyists assign those sort of things.

With that said, it’s incredibly humbling to look back on all of these years and see players and hobbyists still enjoying this design through the muck, storms, and ages. I hope that this release is everything you all want it to be and more.

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Heh! I thought it was kinda cruel that Doc made me do what is effectively an offstring trick (Washing Machine) with his new titanium yo-yo :stuck_out_tongue:

To me, the Walker / Vayder stands out because it hits the ‘sweet spot’ of yo-yo design on a couple different levels. You could certainly argue where exactly that spot is, but having gone in quite skeptical then handling an original and the Vayder… I agree, it’s very much a sweet spot yo-yo that has the “just right” combined qualities of weight distribution, dimensions, shape, etc.

Will the porridge be too hot or too cold for you? I dunno, but a lot of people like this porridge :wink:

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One could say he really put you through the ringer.

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The best recent example with the Mustang, a full Titanium from Turning Point.

Takeshi Matsuura

World Yoyo Contest 2018, 1A Finals, 2nd place

That said, it’s an expensive competition set for most people.

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Excellent! I knew someone would have had to do it by now, but that only raises further question since Takeshi has won WYYC on less lol.

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And now the mustang is one of the most hyped/sought after yoyos these days

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Takeshi could have won it, it just wasn’t in the cards this year with Evan going so strong in the finals. Both yoyoers had essentially new sigs for the contest and they both did great with them.

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My personal favorite non VsN yoyo is either the Berserker (the OG one), the 3rd run Peak, or the Stargazer v2. I also think SEs from OD are pretty great.

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Seems to me that it’s reasonable for an individual to feel a particular yo-yo is the “best yo-yo ever made” as a personal opinion, but it’s fairly dubious to claim it as objective fact which he appears to be doing in this video. Seemed to go very quickly from the very Trumpian “Many people are saying it’s the best yo-yo ever made” to just “the best yo-yo ever made” without any kind of evidence or support for how that bridge was gaped. And with only 88 in existence (I have one) the sample size of opinion has to be kind of small.

Although, maybe I’m misunderstanding.

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