What's good Cereal Kendama family!
As many of you who have followed us on this journey know, shapes are an important thing for us. Since the CREAL 1.5, we have made it a point to improve upon one shape each year.
We released the Elevate in 2020 as our first attempt to make a taller shape - drawing inspiration from Terra's Prefect. 2021 and 2022 saw us tackle a standard shape in the Performer and Hybrid-2.
In 2023, we're looking to play tall once again and introduce an upgrade to the Elevate. We are also merging it with the Performer and introducing one combined shape: Ascent
Ascent marries the best parts of the Performer and Elevate, while introducing new upgrades from our learnings creating the Hybrid-2.
Here's all the important things you need to take note:
1. Ascent is the same height as the Elevate (16.9cm)
The maximum KWC height is 17cm, however in our production there has always been variance in the final sword height. To prevent any instances where we are even remotely above 17cm, we decided to keep the height at 16.9cm
2. Ascent is slimmer where it counts - for gunslingers
We thinned out the upper half of the sword and sarado slightly in order to improve gunslingers. This allows players with larger fingers (like myself) more room to execute multiple slings.
Don't worry though, we didn't let that hurt our lunar balance
3. Bigger cups - preserving our lunar balance
Lunars have always been an important thing for the team at Cereal Kendama. It was the trick that our founders found most satisfying to learn.
Because of that, we have always focused our shapes around building a lunar-friendly ken. With a slimmer sarado potentially reducing the weight of it, we decided to make the cups (all of them) bigger. This allowed us to see a similar sarado-sword weight ratio with the Hybrid-2.
And we know how that does for lunars.
4. Wider balance hole - ensuring great lunar balance
With our base cup getting wider as well, it was important that we widened our balance hole proportionately in order to keep the great lunar balance our kens are known for.
We also made the decision to make it less cylindrical as we felt that it provided a premium aesthetic.
5. Almost forgot - NEW BEVEL
We know we said the last bevel was our "final", but gameplay evolves and we should too. With longer stall points and sarados, we received a lot of feedback to widen our bevel.
Introducing Bevel Max, a 23.5mm bevel with the perfect gradient to land your stall. This is a widest bevel allowed for competition but we believe that it had top be paired with a well calculated bevel slope and inner bevel.
All future Cereal tamas will come with Bevel Max.
And that's it! We are so excited to launch this new shape and offer something that has a different play style as the Hybrid-2.
2023 releases will feature a mix of Hybrid-2 and Ascent while Performer and Elevate will slowly make its retirement.
As always, thank you for being a part of this journey and if you have any questions drop us an email at cerealkendama@gmail.com OR message us on Instagram.
