Tornado v4

The third instalment of the Tornado serie was a very sharp detour from its predecessor. Gone was the buttery, slow and stealthily silent feel of the Tornado V2, in came a fast, solid, clicky and loud cube that became an instant main for so many fast cubers. It was also one of the first cubes to come in three-to-four different variants instead of providing adjustable settings, with names that didn’t help in remembering what they hid under the hood. (To this day, after 2 years, I am unable to remember if Flagship is the one with springs or without them). That in the end the differences were minor was not a reason for many not to get at least 2 versions of the same cube (I am as guilty as many among us of trying both the Pioneer and the Flagship, probably just so that I didn’t have to learn the distinction) – A note : people who like to band their wagons will tell you that “the Flagship is actually better than the Pioneer”, or it might be the other way around I don’t remember. But in neither case is it particularly true if you actually spend more than 10 minutes setting up whichever version you ended up buying.

The Tornado v4 once again comes in many flavours, but in all cases, you’ll be happy to discover a cube that not only brings back the very forgiving, very fast, very light performance of the V3, but also pulls out of the grave some of the silent smoothness of the v2, and provides adjustable magnets that can go a bit weaker to not feel as clicky as the v3 used to be.

The pieces retain that solidity that is in strong contrast to the flexible thin layer of plastic that GAN uses, or the somewhat mushy feel of Moyu cubes (try squeezing the E-slice edges of a Moyu from home grip and you’ll see what I mean). Build quality is fantastic, with no moulding seams and flawless UV coating, and the design is pretty much identical to the former models. The caps are still sometimes blasphemy-inducingly fun to take out, but at least a very convenient blank cap is provided for people who like to bleed, sorry, BLD with their cubes.

The adjustment system remains the stroke of genius that X-Man brought to a world of eternal doofus-shaped plastic screwdrivers, harpoons, katanas or whatever the hell GAN fire-hydrants are supposed to be. Back is the tool-less adjustment, with bi-directional wheels and matching colours to make it really easy to understand what settings you have even for people without the retinal resolution still common among median-age cubers. By now many other have copied part of the system so the younger among us might not realise how revolutionary an idea it was (and still is), so thank them for being brilliant, then tell GAN that they might want to borrow a leaf or two from XMD’s engineering team.

Everyone knows that having more of something is always better, so XMD’s engineers decided that this time it was going to be magnets. And given that we’ve basically put magnets on any surface and sphincter the cuber had to provide, edges now have THREE magnets on each side, with a big attracting one and two small repelling ones. Does it make sense? Eh. Does it look badass? Definitely. Does it make the overall feel of the magnetic click less tactile? To some extent probably, or it might be a better adjustment of the core-corner magnets, or the overall internal friction of the pieces. Or maybe my Tv3 is so worn out that anything new feels like such a great improvement. (Note, the Pioneer is the only one that has the 3 magnets on the edges, and it’s UV, so it’s necessarily better)

Tensioning is a bit less generous than it used to be for newcomers : make it a bit too loose and you’ll be popping pieces at an annoying frequency. But given how easy and effortless it is to adjust tension and travel distance on this cube (that is, once your fingers don’t bleed anymore from trying to take out the center caps), you really owe it to yourself and the cube to find a setting that works for you. And once you do, you’ll have a cube that never locks up, never catches, and lets you get away with stuff that would have most Dayan cubes look like the worst nightmare that Cubists have painted this century. (A note : invest some time on finding the right balance for tension, as it can quickly start to feel too tight and give you the impression that this cube is slow. It isn’t!)

The cube is also smaller than the v3. While the specs theoretically say 55.5mm, the reality is much closer to 55mm (at 55.1mm on the center caps), making it much closer to what most cubes have become of late, much to the delight of people who like me have chubby sausages instead of fingers.

Overall the performance of this thing is fantastic, and if you haven’t just gotten an XT3v1 then you might want to give this a try. XMD doesn’t release as many cubes as some 4-letter brands are able to secrete each year, and when something comes out one should notice, and this cube is worth noticing!

So… Buy?

Yes. If you haven’t broken the bank during the pre-holiday/holiday season, then you probably want to have this cube in your collection. If you need to choose one version, pick the Pioneer… or was it the Flagship… ask around and everyone will tell you that one of them is absolutely better than the other, and you should listen to them because they definitely know what they are talking about… (more seriously, get whichever you want, they’re both perfectly fine)