Now thatmy journey to competing at this year’s Beyblade World Championship has officially begun, I’ve started dedicating a lot of my free time to practicing my launch techniques. Beyblade may look like just a couple of spinning tops randomly bashing into each other, but there’s a lot more skill involved than you might think. How you build your bey, the type of launcher you use, and the angle you launch out at all affect how your bey performs. Once you start to make decisions about all of those things based on your opponent’s strategy, the game starts to become incredibly deep.
The challenge of blading when you’ve got an active gamer lifestyle like mine is that it’s not the easiest game to travel with. The beys themselves are small enough to fit in your pockets, but the arena is way too big to pack in a bag or carry around. What if you want to get a few games of Beyblade in while waiting for the bus or standing in line to get intoa packed screening of A Minecraft Movie? Hasbro’s new portable Clash & Carry Beystadium has the answer.
How To Bey When You Can’t Stay
Hasbro has produced portable Beystadiums in the past for both the original and metal series, but this is the first foldable stadium made for Beyblade X, and its design is pretty genius. The Clash & Carry stadium folds up into a little six-inch carrying case with a handle that can easily slip into a backpack, then unfolds into a 13.6-inch square stadium, complete with knockout zones and an X-Celerator Rail, which give your Beyblade X beys an incredible amount of speed and power.
There’s a few major differences between the Clash & Carry stadium and the stadium that comes with Hasbro’s Xtreme battle set. The Clash & Carry is a much smaller stadium with shallow pockets and no Xtreme zone, so it’s definitely not intended for competitive play. It’s also made of a harder type of plastic than the regular stadium, which somewhat changes how beys move and creates a lot more noise. I expected that the seam running down the middle would cause some stamina issues, but surprisingly, it hasn’t been a factor in any of the matches I’ve played.
The harder plastic is able to withstand the metal needle bit better than other stadiums, so this might be a good way to get some use out of a part you’d never want to use in a more expensive stadium.
The biggest difference between the Clash & Carry stadium and others is how low its side walls are. It’s much easier for beys to fly out of the stadium and turn into somewhat dangerous projectiles. The very first time I used this stadium was at my local game shop during Monday night Lorcana, and on our very first launch my opponent’s Gale Wyvern smashed into my Buster Dran so hard that it went flying two tables over and nearly hit someone. Beyblade is no longer allowed in my LGS.
Blade Where You Want, When You Want
As long as you’re in the right setting, the Clash & Carry stadium is the perfect way to play on the go. I’ve been busting this thing out everywhere and challenging friends and strangers to impromptu battles, and it’s been so fun watching people discover Beyblade again for the first time since they were kids, or even for the first time ever.
Park tables, mall food courts, hanging out by the pool, camping outside Microcenter for a new graphics card (you gotta do what you gotta do); if you see me out there, I’m lettin’ it rip. I love that I can slide the stadium into my backpack and still fit all my other essentials alongside it. The other day I was getting a smog test at a gas station near my house, and instead of sitting outside and staring at my phone like I normally would, I busted out my Clash & Carry and started practicing my launches. By the time my smog check was done, I had made three new friends who had no idea Beyblade wasn’t just still around but better than ever.
If Hasbro releases an update to the Clash & Carry in the future like it has done with other portable stadiums in the past, I’d love to see some kind of storage on the stadium. There’s nowhere to put your beys or your launcher, so it’s still not quite as portable as I would like. It definitely needs higher side walls too, both to protect kids from flying hunks of metal, and to help me convince my LGS to let me bring Beyblade back into the store. I promise it won’t happen again!
