Friendship/729 Crazy Victory 2

Quality, thickness, and consistency are very good.

So, it’s a Friendship version of DHS’s Long 5x, thicker core with inner carbon.

101 grams! Quality is good, the handle is good, big and thick enough. As with any Friendship blade I’ve seen, the edges are sharp and need to be sanded off. The surface is not sealed, I lacquered it.

Rubbers: Rxton III on both sides.

Speed & power: Off blade, not super fast, but not slow either.

Control: Very good!

Arc: Medium high, medium long. Great for me. I dislike very long arcs.

Drives: Average. The ball slips on the surface a bit like with any ALC blade I’ve tried. But not too bad.

Looping: Actually cool! Especially from mid-distance and far away. Easy and controlled. I think this is the strongest aspect of the blade.

Flicks (update 2025): Average. BH flicks are tiring, probably due to the blade’s weight.

Pushes: Good. I had some pushes that were higher than expected initially. But that went away as I was getting used to the blade.

Other peculiarities: It requires a more closed racket angle when countering topspins. With a more open racket, the incoming ball too easily jumps off the racket edge.

Final thoughts (update 2025): A training blade for me due to weight.

P.S. The Rage series from Friendship/729 has an outer carbon blade. Because of this blade, I’m now very tempted to try the outer carbon version. (Update 2025) The outer carbon blade won for me.

P.S.1 (2025) I now have H3Neo on both sides, and the blade becomes heavy, slow, and more difficult to use. It has power and spin on bigger swings. But I don’t have that much energy to swing that hard all the time, and I struggle quite a lot with slow or no-spin balls. Overall, it’s just too heavy a setup for me.

I conclude that the blade works better with hybrid or tensor rubbers; it then has a pleasant slingshot effect on counter-looping and offers better speed on medium strokes.