OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Look which of these rubbers below on current LARC listed as expires , will disappear (or renewed) on next LARC two days from now
See if your favorite rubber is on this hit list
Click on the image below to expand

I think a lot of these are actually rebranding exercises - they're retiring the old molds without the new ITTF numbers. Take Yinhe Mercury, Mars and Saturn for instance. If you peruse the LARC:

https://equipment.ittf.com/#/equipment/racket_coverings

and look at the second page of Yinhe's entries, you'll notice a bunch of the old rubbers at the bottom, some with expiry dates. Looking at the headstamp photos, they're all older ones with no ITTF numbers. They've already been replaced, above, by "Moxa Mercury" (49-021), "Maxtense Mars" (49-024) and "Maxtense Saturn" (49-026), with updated headstamps. Note that Moxa Mercury is available in Blue and Green (as well as Black and Red), Maxtense Mars in Pink and Violet, and Maxtense Saturn in Blue and Pink.

I suppose the conspiracy nuts and alarmists among us will complain that the "new rubbers won't be the same", well, maybe that's true (Yinhe has, over the years, made multiple versions of rubbers with the same - or ostensibly the same - topsheet, there was the original Mars, and Mars II and Mars III, sometimes they'd vary in tackiness) but I'd argue you'd likely find variations from batch to batch and sheet to sheet anyway and it doesn't really matter in the end. I am looking forward to getting some violet Maxtense Mars..

Iskandar