Hmm. I guess the OD Project/Project 2, YYF G5, and CLYW Peak are up there for me as far as influencing my choices since owning them.
But if I’m just choosing one, it’d probably be the hardcoat ILYY E1NS I owned circa 2009. The E1NS is a truly great design visually, and each run performed well enough, but the aspect of that hardcoated one that still gets me to this day is how smooth it was. My appreciation for precision and the extent to which I seek it out changed drastically after owning that yoyo.
If all I owned was my Aluminum Dream or Dogma, my lack of skill on a trick would have nothing to do with the yo-yo. The only one I didn’t relate to was the Ko’olau, but it was so long ago, I might have changed my mind. Never experienced any QC issues though.
The Stargazer by far. It was the first time I ever felt in my hand what a true premium yoyo was. The feeling has stuck with me to this day. I really couldn’t afford it at the time, but the Stardust was making such a splash on the yoyonation forums that I just had to try 44re:creation’s anticipated follow-up. Now it’s my grail, and I feel fortunate getting to own it again.
OK, one would have to be the YYJ Hitman, one of my all time favorites. It was the first yoyo I spent more than $30 on. A real breakthrough for me. Prior to that $20 was my limit.
Next would be the Dif-E-Yo GTO. My first metal, bought it used for $60. That was a big step.
Going further down that slippery slope I purchased a new AntiYo Fluchs. I think it was $90. After that it was all down hill from there.
Mine is probably the @codinghorror X VSNYC Ti-Vayder. It was my EDC for the longest time, about 2 years and allowed me to yoyo more often without fear of damaging the yoyo.
For me it was the YYF Dogma, it was the first YoYo I purchased after getting back into throwing, and I still have it… and play it,…. And it’s still great!
Nice!! Hopefully it opened the door to a lot more titanium for “regular folks”, it’s an amazing metal… I remember lusting after titanium mountain bike frames back in the day…
What got me into tricks past rock the baby that i remember begging my dad at the grocery store to shell out $14 for (which at the time seemed ridiculous for a yoyo) as an 8yo. That commercial campaign to be the fastest really worked on my young brainmeat.
My first metal/unresponsive that i found as a result of being a weird 10yo whod look up the most expensive of things on ebay, somehow led down the rabbit hole to yoyoguy.com (RIP). I remember having a bald spot from getting gum in my hair and crying in class for getting it taken away. It was a pretty tragic day from my childhood ik
And what I would say is the most influential throw is the yyf G5. It was the first time I saw a yoyo sell out insanely quick with the red star version on yoyoguy. It made me realize there was a community of people willing to pay what was an insane 100usd for a toy, and led to me reading about project red alert and visiting that blog page that listed the history of all the releases. I must’ve read that page a hundred times.
I think I asked my parents to have an advanced bday present when the Bluestar version got released and it was my first premium metal that I got when I had no right owning such a piece of machining. I learned Buddha’s revenge on kyos website and would bring it to school with me getting dings just repeating that one trick.
It led me to extremespin where I had my first experience with the community! With my account aptly named BlueStarG5 I asked the intrepid members of the forum if I killed my bearing by washing it with dish soap. From then on I have kept my place in the community as a happy yoyo scrub.
Through all the times this G5 has been dinged, unscrewed in the middle of my 100th repitition of Buddha revenge, and satined/tuned, it’s stayed in my possession. I had taken many multiple year long breaks, had stints where I would sell my entire collection, where I would try to move past this hobby, but this yoyo was the genesis and felt like my golden ticket to be a part of a community greater than myself.
Most influential must be my first unresponsive yoyo, the Shutter. I know the community’s sentiment that it’s that not great but I find it very comfortable to throw.
Don’t listen to the grumblings of the community. The Shutter is a solid throw. The only thing that matters is that you like it and you throw it. If that’s the one that had the biggest influence then it belongs here in this thread.
Personally, i like them too. The JDS version being my favorite.
Back in maybe…'97/'98 I bought one of these on a whim in a candyshop. Twix and Skittles were doing a marketing campaign with these. They were something like…idunno. $3-4 or something. And they came with a little leaflet that had tricks in it.
I learned all the tricks I could with it. Burned out strings like crazy (it was a wooden axle) and everytime a string broke I threw my yoyo in to the ground…which means I shattered something like 3 or 4 of them in a couple of months.
Many yoyos after have come (most of them recently but including my first bearing based yoyo back in '99).
But this one is by FAR the most influential.
After that probably the MagicYoyo Focus. That opened my eyes to what actual performance can look like. But I still have a special place in my heart for those Twix/Skittles Russell yoyos. And wish I could find one. (I know the Cocacola ones can be found. But that’s not that one for me)
Oh, man, that brings back memories for me! I still haven’t found a lot of my old yoyos from the late '90s, but I was able to find a few of them including the Reactor:
I keep hoping that I’ll find a box with the rest of them. Maybe this summer when I finally try to clean out and organize the garage! I don’t know if this was my first metal, but if it wasn’t it may have been my second or third. I remember being slightly scared of throwing it because metal hurts a lot more than plastic It’s really weird to throw this now because it’s so wildly different than the unresponsive metals that I throw today.
It’s different in a number of ways, so much so that I feel like an absolute newb when trying to do anything with it. First, the string is super short and might be cotton; maybe I was a lot shorter back then? I just did a rough measurement, and it’s about 6 inches shorter than what I’m using now. That’s a lot for me as I’ve found that a difference of 1cm has the potential to change a “fast” yoyo into a “slow” yoyo. Something about how it takes longer to go around into a double or nothing, I think. It’s also undersized and very narrow (for me), roughly 50x27mm and 58g.
It’s also responsive by way of friction stickers, so it sleeps but comes back with a tug. I’m used to unresponsive C bearings, and this one is tiny - I guess an A? It’s never been cleaned or lubed as I never got into the maintenance aspect of throwing back then. That’s probably why it sleeps, but not for very long.
It’s a balancing act as I have to throw it carefully enough to keep it on plane since it’s narrow and likes to tilt, but if I don’t throw it hard then it won’t be able to sleep long enough for tricks. On a good breakaway, I can do a trapeze, brother, DoN, and then it barely has enough spin to come back even if I bind. I should probably try cleaning and lubing the bearing to see how much that improves things. Or maybe just buy a new bearing and string it with a longer poly string to see if that helps things. That sounds like a fun experiment, but a tiny part of me wants to keep it the way that it is as a reminder of what yoying used to be like for me ages ago. Kind of like a time capsule yoyo! I guess that I have my YYJ Dragon Jams and Spin Faktor for that, though.
It’s really weird to throw this now because it’s so wildly different than the unresponsive metals that I throw today.