MoreTry Tianma X3

3x3
October 22nd, 2022
Basillio Noris
TL;DR

This is a good cube that feels very cheap but actually performs pretty well.

  • Weight & feel – average weight, but you feel the pieces' inertia when turning
  • Turning Speed – fast, but very controlled thanks to magnets
  • Corner Cutting  stellar, with no hard locks
  • Magnets – strong and clicky, non-adjustable
  • Lockups – none
  • Sound – loud and low-pitched
  • Looks – The shiny plastic has molding bumps on all corners that give it an overall cheap look. For the rest it looks like a Moyu cube. I like the logo though.
  • Plastic – sturdy. Technically high quality, but feels cheap. However:  shiny!
  • Similar-feel cubes – Gan12, Tengyun 1 but with a ton of magnets
  • Price – 25-35$
It's a great cube that feels like ©#*†

First thing you'll notice is the shiny cheap plastic, the second one is that it is blocky and noisy, third that despite the very cheap feel, it is a pretty good cube. After playing with it for a couple of days, I can see what they tried to do: Reproduce the compact, sharp,  sturdy-but-hollow feel of the Gan12, as well as its very magnetic feel. That a new brand might want to emulate one of the big players in the field is understandable, that they did it in such a half-assed way, maybe too.

The cube is very fast, it sports the same effortless stiff turning that you find on the first Tengyun and the Gan12. Of this latter, it also has the same auto-align feature, which some love and others feel awkward at least until they get used to it. The magnetic click is very pronounced, among the strongest from recent cubes. Because of the heft of its pieces (this thing is nowhere near as light and gossamer-like as the Gan11/12) the inertia of pieces overshooting creates a vibration that makes the whole cube wobble a bit.

It's difficult to talk about corner-cutting for this cube, as the auto-align feature makes it never have to happen. If you really try, there's a narrow spot around the ~70 degrees where the cube will lock up, but good luck making that happen mid-solve. Slices are not great, the strong magnets don't let things flow without effort, and while for M slices that can be compensated with a bit more effort, S and E slices feel like scraping a bunch of Lego bricks together from the wrong side. Roux solvers might want to stay away from this one.

And yet, despite all that, the cube is not bad : it takes very little effort to turn, it is extremely forgiving of errors and overshoots.

The noise is loud and not in a good way, between the hollow pieces and magnet clicks it is a constant brrrrrrr, and not of the good kind . Its redeeming quality is that the pitch is rather low and the cube doesn't clack, but this thing is in no way silent. In terms of build and feel, they tried, and failed, at giving it a shiny look just like the current GAN flagship, but in the end it looks and feels like a clacky Yuxin Little Magic.

And finally, customization, or rather its lack of any. Yes, you can opt to buy a version with fewer magnets (I tested the Triple Magnetic version), and maybe that's going to be better for you. But since you won't know beforehand what might suit your style best, that's not as great an idea as the marketing team at MoreTry must have thought. Also, I ordered the maglev version but received a springed one instead, which indicates that the difference is not easy for vendors or resellers either. Not that I'm complaining, this thing already has enough magnets to feed a small family of metal golems.

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