The 21 Best Table Tennis Blades For Every Player

Your blade is the soul of your racket. It acts as the link between the ball and your hand.

You should handle your blade as if it was an extension of your hands. This can only be achieved if you have a high-quality blade that suits your style.

Based on 25+ years of playing experience, 10+ years of coaching experience and testing hundreds of different rackets, this page covers our top recommended blades for every different kind of player.

Image	Product	Why We Recommend	Price
Beginners	Nittaku Acoustic	Superb hand feeling. Unparalleled spin generation capabilities. Controllable yet markedly offensive.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price
Intermediate and Advanced Players	Butterfly Viscaria	Stable and spinny. Huge sweet spot. Crisp feeling and great sound.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price
Control	Stiga Allround Classic	Versatile across many playing styles. Great control and feeling. Soft and very flexible.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price
Spin	Nittaku Violin	Superb feeling and build quality. Very soft and flexible. Great hold and dwell time.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price
For Pimples	Victas Koji Matsushita	Soft, flexible and controllable. Great feeling and dwell time. Ideal for defensive play.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price
For Speed	Butterfly Primorac Carbon	Extremely high speed levels. Hard, stiff and direct. Ideal for ultra-offensive players.	Check Local Seller PriceCheck Amazon Price

Choosing the best table tennis blade

Over our 25+ years of table tennis experience, we have tested hundreds of pieces of equipment. You can also find our top recommended rubbers for table tennis players to complement this list.

We regularly purchase new table tennis blades, rubbers, and rackets and test them for over 10+ hours to provide table tennis players with high-quality, comprehensive reviews. If you want to learn more about the way we create content, here’s a link to our editorial process.

In this article, we will present you with 3 different choices for each of the categories:

• Top Pick – This blade is our primary recommendation based on our extensive testing and our experience.
• Alternative – A great option if our top pick is not available, or has any specific elements that don’t fit your specific circumstances.
• Budget – For people with limited funds who still want an effective blade that won’t hold them back. 

Best Table Tennis Blade for Beginners

What Beginners should look for in a table tennis blade

The main attributes beginners should look for when buying a table tennis blade are high control, good feeling, all-wood compositions, and high flexibility. As a beginner, you want to avoid composite blades, hard blades, and fast blades, since you’ll need a forgiving racket to progress more easily.

Why we love the Nittaku Acoustic for Beginners

We absolutely love the Nittaku Acoustic, not only for beginners but for every level of play. Even the greatest table tennis player of all time, Ma Long, used to play with an Acoustic in his early twenties. The Acoustic has a special hand feeling, superb control, and great flexibility, making it the ideal blade for developing players.

The Nittaku Acoustic is a soft, flexible blade that provides lots of feedback to the player, which greatly helps when learning and improving techniques. Depending on the feedback you receive from your Acoustic, you’ll be able to tell how well you hit the ball.

The Acoustic is an incredibly spinny blade because of its speed levels and its flexibility. It grants a very long dwell time, so it’s quite controllable. This blade is ideal for getting the ball on the table with tons of spin and more than adequate speed.

Nittaku Acoustic Specifications

Best budget table tennis blade for Beginners

The best budget blade for beginners is the Yasaka Sweden Extra. It’s a very controllable, flexy blade with a great feeling. It’s the ideal blade for developing offensive players. 

If you’re already confident about your table tennis player style, all-round and defensive beginners can look at its siblings, the Yasaka Sweden Classic and the Yasaka Sweden Guardian, respectively.

Best Table Tennis Blades for Intermediate and Advanced Players

What Intermediate and Advanced Players should look for in a table tennis blade

The main characteristics that appeal to intermediate and advanced players are spin capabilities, stability, feeling, hardness and speed. 

Most skilled table tennis players will need their blades to be faster, stiffer, and harder than that of beginner players so that they can attack powerfully and consistently. A more solid blade bites the ball better and it is more consistent when power looping and counterlooping.

The stiffer the blade, the less it bends on impact, making high-speed shots a lot more consistent. The harder a blade is, the better it bites the plastic ball. A softer blade makes it easier to generate spin as it “embraces” the ball. A harder blade has a crisper feeling which is ideal for power shots.

With this in mind, we recommend looking for composite blades as these provide a great balance of spin and flexibility. In particular, we love Arylate Carbon blades that provide great stability for blocks, flat hits, and counterloops.

Why we love the Butterfly Viscaria for Intermediate and Advanced Players

The Butterfly Viscaria needs no introduction. It was (and still is) the choice of many professional players. The Viscaria manages to generate tons of spin while having the hardness and stability needed for the modern offensive style.

After the release of the Viscaria, all the manufacturers started producing tons of blades with a very similar (or identical) construction. One of these blades is the Timo Boll ALC, which has the same construction but a different handle and weight balance.

Everyone in the market aims to replicate the playing characteristics of the Viscaria because it offers what no other blade can. It has a very large sweet spot, a long dwell time, lots of stability, and it’s great for both looping and blocking. In short, it’s likely the best offensive blade available.

Butterfly Viscaria Specifications

Best budget table tennis blade for Intermediate and Advanced Players

Our favorite blade for intermediate and advanced level players is the Yasaka Ma Lin Extra Offensive. Even though it’s an all-wood blade, Yasaka gave it hard outer plies that give it the necessary hardness that blades must have to tackle the modern plastic ball. 

It has more than enough speed to score winners with the right rubbers. We have written a guide on how to choose the ideal rubbers for every blade. We’d recommend pairing the Ma Lin Extra Offensive with modern tensor rubbers for a fast and spinny setup.

Best Table Tennis Blade for Control

What characteristics you should look out for if you want a controllable blade

Most controllable blades will hover in the allround and defensive categories. Controllable blades are super effective at amateur levels of play because they facilitate the most important aspects of the sport: Getting the ball on the table and playing out the service and receive. 

Controllable blades usually feature all-wood compositions. They are soft and flexible, they vibrate quite a bit and their speed is medium. These characteristics make it easy to control the ball, as the softness of the blade embraces the ball well and makes it easy to add spin to your shots. 

Why we love the Stiga Allround Classic for Control

The Stiga Allround Classic has been in the market for more than half a century. Since then, well over a million Allround Classic blades have been sold. The Allround Classic has a great hand feeling, tons of control, high flexibility, and low weight.

The Stiga Allround classic is not a particularly fast blade, which makes it very versatile. How it plays depends largely on what rubbers you pair it with, as its speed levels make it possible to attack and defend with it. 

However, even if you pair it with high-end offensive rubbers, the Stiga Allround Classic will retain its superb touch for the ball and its control.

Stiga Allround Classic Specifications

Best budget Control table tennis blade

Our favorite budget control blade is the Yasaka Sweden Classic. The Sweden Classic is also an iconic blade with great feeling and control.

This Sweden-made blade is very soft and flexible, which gives it superb spin-generation qualities. The Sweden Classic grabs the ball for quite a long time as it has a very long dwell time, it bends at impact and shoots out spinny balls with ease.

The Sweden Classic is the blade to get if you want a traditional 5-ply all-wood blade with which you can dominate the game using clever placement and variating spins.

Best Table Tennis Blade for Spin

What you should look for if you want a spinny table tennis blade

The main characteristics of a spinny blade are high flexibility and low thickness, mainly. These two factors make for high spin generation because the blade will bend more at impact. Stiffer and thicker blades bend less so they are better for flat hits, hit-loops, blocks, and smashes.

Spinny blades can be either all-wood or composite. All-wood blades tend to make it easier to spin the ball but composite blades are a lot more stable when playing high-speed, spinny shots. 

Why we love the Nittaku Violin for Spin 

The Nittaku Violin shares the same exceptional hand feeling as its faster brother, the Acoustic. Because of its lesser speed, the Violin has a longer dwell time, so it enables players to impart even more spin on their shots. 

Its control and feel are among the best, and it is a very flexible blade. As the Violin is a Nittaku blade, its build quality is excellent and its materials are of the highest quality. The Violin is an amazing blade for regular loops as well as open-ups, and any kind of spin shot if paired with the right rubbers, really.

If you’re looking to purchase a Violin, remember that you have 2 variants to choose from, the Violin and the Violin LG. The regular Violin has a small handle while the LG has a large handle, so you can choose the one that fits your hand better. 

Nittaku Violin Specifications

Best budget table tennis blade for Spin

Our top pick for a budget spinny blade is the Yinhe MC-2. At around $20, you simply can’t get a better blade for spinny offensive play. The MC-2 has earned a great reputation for being a looping machine, and a steal at its price point.

Best Table Tennis Blade for Pimples

What you should look for if you want a table tennis blade that’s good for pimples

If you want to use pimples on a table tennis racket, then you should use a controllable defensive blade. Some players, such as Joo Se Hyuk, prefer using stiff and hard blades for chopping, while others prefer the feel of a soft, flexy blade. You need control and a large head size. The rest is up to personal preference.

Why we love the Victas Koji Matsushita for Pimples

The Victas Koji Matsushita is possibly the best blade out there for modern defenders. Its quality of craftsmanship is unparalleled, it has tons of control and a very large head size, making it the ideal pairing for a sheet of long pimples.

The Victas Koji Matsushita is great for chopping away from the table as well as blocking and pushing close to the table. In addition, it retains sufficient power to attack whenever you get an opportunity.

Introduced in 2011, this blade was created to support the modern defensive style, and it’s currently the blade of choice of two of the best defenders on the ITTF circuit: Han Ying and Wang Yang.

Its design is superb because it strikes the perfect balance of speed and hardness. Some defensive blades, like the Donic Defplay Senso, are almost too slow for high-level offensive play. The Koji Matsushita is slow enough to control the opponent’s attacks while retaining more than enough offensive potential.

In addition, the Koji Matsushita is hand-made in Japan, so you can expect a level of finishing that’s second to none.

Victas Koji Matsushita Specifications

Best budget table tennis blade for Pimples

The best budget table tennis blade for defenders is the Donic Defplay Senso V3, without a doubt. It’s a very slow, soft, controllable blade that’s ideal for absorbing and controlling incoming loops. It’s the perfect choice for long pips blockers and defenders.

Best Table Tennis Blade for Speed

What you should look for if you want a fast table tennis blade

If you want the fastest out there, your best bet is to opt for a composite blade. Most fast blades will also be stiff and hard, and thus, they are super stable. However, these blades are quite unforgiving because of their speed levels, so I’d only recommend them for experienced offensive players.

Why we love the Butterfly Primorac Carbon for Speed

The Butterfly Primorac Carbon is the first blade that comes to mind when we talk about speed. It features a Tamca 5000-Hinoki configuration that works wonders for generating power. The Tamca 5000 fibers make the blade very fast and stable while the Hinoki outer plies give the blade a bit more “sink”, softness and control.

The Primorac Carbon is one of the fastest blades available and will provide more speed than most players will even need. We didn’t recommend the fastest blade available in the market as there is a threshold where more speed is clearly counterproductive. In fact, most professional players utilize slower blades than the Primorac Carbon.

The Primorac Carbon was recently used by German legend Timo Boll. He switched to the Primorac Carbon wanting to add more power to his shots, but he went back to his Boll ALC some months later. We believe that the Primorac Carbon is the fastest blade that makes sense to play with.

Butterfly Primorac Carbon Specifications

Best budget table tennis blade for Speed

The Donic Original Carbospeed is not necessarily a budget blade but it’s the cheapest reputable fast blade in the market. It features a Hinoki-ALC design that makes the blade very fast and fun to use. Lots of professional Donic-sponsored players utilize this blade.

How To Choose a Table Tennis Blade

Choosing a table tennis blade can be difficult because there are lots of offerings in the market. It’s easy to make a suboptimal choice if you don’t know better because of all the different composites and blade designs out there.

However, choosing your blade isn’t difficult at all if you know what you’re looking for. We have written a complete, comprehensive guide about choosing the right table tennis blade and explained the best blades are for every playing style and level of play.

Style of Play

If you want to make a good choice regarding table tennis blades, it is essential that you know your playing style. Your playing style is what dictates what blade is the best for you.

If you want to know what your playstyle is, make sure to take our playing styles quiz!

Speed, Spin, Control

The speed of a blade is inversely proportional to its control. The faster a blade is, the less control it’ll have.

This is, of course, a simplification. There are very fast rackets that retain good control and there are also some slower bad quality blades that are inconsistent even if they’re slower.

You want to get a good quality blade that has great control and hand feeling relative to its speed level. 

Some blades seem to escape the speed/control rule, such as the Timo Boll ALC, the Yasaka Ma Lin Extra Offensive, and the Nittaku Acoustic. These are very controllable for their speed levels.

These blades receive the most praise from reviewers and are the most popular models because of their great playing characteristics (they have the best designs).

In terms of spin, flexible blades are spinnier than stiff blades.

However, flexible blades are a lot more unstable than stiff blades at high speed exchanges because of the same reason why they’re spinnier: they bend more at impact.

If you’re a beginner or an intermediate-level player, you can get flexible blades since the added stability of stiff blades is only needed on counter topspin rallies and high-speed exchanges.

If you’re an advanced player, then you’d probably benefit from using a stable blade. This is why most high-level players utilize composite blades. 

If you pair a solid composite blade with spinny tensor rubbers, then you’ll have the best of both worlds since you’ll have the stability of the blade and more than enough spin from the rubbers.

All Wood vs Carbon Blades

There are 3 main differences between all wood and carbon blades.

The first difference lies in the hand feeling of the blades. Composites will greatly alter how shots feel in your hand.

ALC blades feel “muted”, for example. Most carbon blades will vibrate a lot less on impact than all-wood blades. 

The second difference between carbon blades and all-wood blades is the sweet spot.

All-wood blades have a much smaller sweet spot than carbon blades, that is, you have to hit the ball in the center of the racket to play a high-quality shot. If you hit the ball a bit towards the edges, then the stability and the quality of your shot will suffer a lot.

The composite layer on carbon blades makes them a lot more uniform. This means that you don’t get nearly as penalized if you hit the ball near the edges of your racket. 

The third difference between all wood and carbon blades is in their stiffness and flexibility.

All-wood blades feel a lot more unstable and they vibrate a lot more on impact than carbon blades.

Carbon blades are a lot more direct and precise than all-wood blades.

Blade Hardness or Blade Stiffness

The hardness of a blade determines how easy it is to get spin out of it. 

Soft blades generally give better spin, touch, and dwell time on the ball. Hard blades have crisper contacts for power shots. They’re more direct and accurate.

The stiffness of a blade determines how much the blade bends when hitting the ball. 

More flexibility is better for spin because the blade “gives” more (like a trampoline) and more stiffness is better for hitting and blocking because it is more stable (like a wall). Also, flexible blades tend to vibrate more than stiffer blades.