Moyu WRM V10

It was bound to happen : you can’t come out with more than half a dozen different cubes in 1 year and hope they’re all hits. 

Moyu has been working hard at making very slight variations to a successful cube design and calling them with different names, instead of – say – trying to have a single cube and add customisations to it. It’s the software development equivalent of publishing pre-releases of all your apps knowing that some of the features you’re releasing are probably bunk, but some users might like them. Queue in the RS3M Super, Super 2, v5, the YS3M, The WRM v9, Super, as slight variations each on existing designs.

But while some of the piece design was slightly modified, and each version did come out with Ball-Core, Maglev or neither as options, one of the key elements to the Moyu design (and arguably one of the gems behind their success) has been a constant, reliable, trusty friend : the DAS (Dual Adjustment System) with its iconic blue ring and screw. It has been in all Moyu cubes from the budget RS3M line back when it was a budget cube to the WRM flagships back from when they were called GTS and WR meant that it didn’t have ridges.

And now for some unfathomable reason, they’ve decided to drop the working formula, play a Dayan and introduce an overly complex compression & travel-distance adjustment system that turns reliably great cubes (if sometimes an acquired taste, like the YS3M), into a mediocre product that feels like a budget knock-off until you spend sufficient hours trying to find good settings and breaking it in to make it an ok cube, instead of going head to head with GAN to aim for the “best cube available today”. Trying is good. Failing but then still releasing the failure is not. The product managers at Moyu should have had the testicular fortitude to tell to their management “we tried something new, spent several months in designing it, and the cube unfortunately feels like equine droppings”. Instead they went for “it’s a new design!” (I’ll let you fill in the relevant “employee of the month” meme speech-bubbles).

Gone are the screw and compression ring that have been as simple to adjust and swap across cubes as they were powerful and flexible. Enter a compression gear that you need a stick or screwdriver thin enough to reach down and turn (Note: the halberd-like screwdriver they give you with the cube unfortunately has some trouble to fit in between the moving elements inside the center piece. Also note : thank you for providing a screwdriver now that there’s no screws anymore…). Unfortunately the loosest settings on the gear is already uncomfortably tight for many, and making it tighter won’t help. If only there were a way to let you have a very broad range of possible tightnesses that is continuous and can be adjusted easily… oh wait, there was… and they decided to remove it.

I can understand that there probably are production and economical reasons behind it : a completely plastic core means fewer steps in the production and assembly as you don’t need to have plastic pieces and metal bars that you have to produce separately first and then screw into each other. But you better make sure that the result is worth the change, especially if you’ve been consistently producing the exact same internal pieces for the better part of 6 years now.

The result of all this search for something new is a cube that feels cheap, is too tight for comfort, locks up like crazy, and will force you to go through a ton of different settings making you hate every single minute you lose trying to clip the travel-distance gear by the correct amount of notches. If you spend enough time you’ll eventually find settings that make it not suck, turning this cube into an ok cube that still feels like cheap plastic and doesn’t feel like much of what Moyu has been releasing for the past 4 years.

In a sense, the cube feels like a direct descendant of the original WRM from 2019 : hard, somewhat hollow plastic that feels compact and hard when turning. But while the WRM19 (and GTS3M) had a fantastic turning and flexibility, making them cubes that many still main for some events even 5 years later, this one just locks up at weird times, and even when it doesn’t, it just feels like a cube from several years ago. You wouldn’t be too off the mark if you consider it as a UV version of the old Meilong : A perfectly fine cheap cube with good magnets, mostly light to turn but a bit locky. Except that the Meilong was a 5$ cube, and this one is 30-35$ if you take the Ball-Core version. (Also, a v2 of the Meilong has come out at about the same time as this one, and it leaves both its predecessor AND the v10 in the dust.)

The look is also something where Moyu has taken steps in a new direction. Let's do away with the flat bevels on the center caps that started with the WRM 21 purplev and evolved through the last several releases, and had a distinctive look that not only looked great with its purple or teal internals, but it also felt like some OTHER than all of the other cubes which were mostly parroting the blue-logoed apple-wannabe brand. The WRM v10 has decided to try and be creative, and the results basically looks identical to a GAN cube with the circular center cap and deep bevels you can find on 90% of cubes. (It should be said : the Meilong v2 has the exact same external design so it’s not something that we can throw on the v10 itself, more of a “recent developments” thing on all MOYU’s cube lines.)

So should you buy it?

I don’t think I’ll be recommending the WRM v10 to many people. There currently are at least 5 Moyu cubes that I’d suggest before this one: (in no particular order) the YS3M, the RS3M v5, the WRM Super, the WRM v9 and, seriously, the Meilong v2. All of these are excellent cubes at very different price points that all provide that slightly soft Moyu feel and have fantastic performances. This one? Not so much.

Fun fact : I’ve tried swapping the core of the WRM v9 into this one and… it’s actually not half bad! You have to replace the centre-piece casings as the groves of the v10 pieces are completely new, which means that the spring compression doesn’t work anymore (note: you can still increase the spring compression by dropping a small ring of cardboard under the maglev or spring inside the DAS ring). But you’ll be able to adjust the travel distance properly and obtain a cube that does actually perform like a flagship cube from one of the best 2 brands of the past several years. I might even prefer it to the v9 itself, which at least means that you’re not just sacrificing a v9 for the sake of making the v10 usable. You’re still buying 2 cubes to make one usable, so you might just as well pay the price of FOUR of them and get a WRM Super. The resulting v10/9 hybrid does beat out the Meilong v2, but it does it at 8x the price. Nevertheless, if you’re willing to support Moyu and have a v9 laying around that you haven’t been using, then this is not a terrible cube to have!

A note: this cube was generously provided by SpeedCubeShop.com, which is kind enough to send me cubes for testing as long as some of you use the code SCDB when purchasing from them. So if you’re buying a cube and you want to get it decently quickly, consider making your purchase using [This link]. That will send some love our way and let me keep doing this!