Review sample provided by Themasterpiece. Not sponsored, not approved by them before publishing.
Intro
AFK is a collaboration between the French brand Themasterpiece and yoozy, an artist and peripheral enthusiast. It's yoozy's first collab release.
I got the pad on the 21st of August and it's been my daily since, so here's how it actually holds up.
Specs
- Size: 49 x 42 cm
- Thickness: 4 mm
- Surface: ZX, cloth, textured, marketed as balanced
- Base: PU BASE - SOFT (Poron Soft)
- Edges: stitched under the surface
- Colorways: Black, Royal Blue, Orange
- Price: 44€, limited to 100 units
Unboxing
Themasterpiece sent me several pads in one large box, so I can't speak to what a single retail order looks like. What I can speak to is how the pad was packed: flat, in a cardboard box that keeps it that way, with a plastic sleeve over the pad itself.
That sleeve is a small thing but I want to give credit for it. It keeps moisture and anything else off the surface in transit, and I've had cloth pads show up wet before. More brands should be doing this.
Design
The art earns the name: a mech slumped into an armchair, sword put down, mug next to it. Calling that AFK is generous, the thing has clocked out entirely. Colors pop and the detail survives the print. I'm not anti-colorful, but this one is unusually vibrant by my standards, and I still genuinely enjoy having it in front of me.
Branding sits bottom right, small and out of the way. Mine is the Royal Blue, my favorite of the three.
Build quality
The stitching runs under the surface rather than around the perimeter, and it sits properly below the glide surface rather than level with it, so there's nothing to catch on at the border. This is one of the only cloth pads where I genuinely don't notice the stitching at all in use. After a week and a half of daily use there's no fraying, no lifted thread, and the print hasn't picked up any shine or dark patches in the spots I use most.
The Soft Poron behaves like a good soft base should. What stands out is how much grip it has. It's significantly stickier than comparable Poron soft bases. If I shove the pad sideways with any force, my desk moves before the pad does.
Surface
Mice used: X2N Crazylight Mini, Vaxee NP-01S V3, EGG OP1 8k v2 and ATK A9 Mini+ Skates used: Vaxee NP-01S V3 stock, UNWS Magic Ice Plus dots, UNWS Red Capsules, Xraypad Jade Donuts and Ultraglide Silencer dots
AFK is textured, but textured in a different way than most cloth pads I own. It never gets as abrasive as a Zero or even a Hien can feel, and that doesn't make it a smooth pad either.
Side by side with an Artisan Zero SOFT, AFK is the slightly faster of the two, and the smoother texture definitely plays a part in the perception here. Smooth tracking is entirely doable here without giving up stopping power. The surface is one reason for that, the base is the other: it allows good pushdown without being so soft that you sink into it.
Micro-adjustments come out smooth, never stuttery or muddy. That gets harder to hold onto the faster your sens gets, though faster skates counteract it a bit.
Skate choice moves it a decent bit. On Magic Ice dots and Jade Donuts there is solid speed to get out of this pad. On fuller or more neutral leaning skates it performed pretty true to its nature.
Themasterpiece calls the ZX surface "balanced" and that's roughly where it lands, with a slight tendency toward speed.
Sleeve compatibility
Feeling the texture for the first time, I had already written this off. Put a sleeve on, and it actually works.
AFK is decently sleeve compatible. My best result by a clear margin was the Prosicion sleeve worn inside-out, which is a combination I'd recommend trying if you own one. The WALLHACK sleeve and a handful of cheap AliExpress sleeves weren't as good, but even those did better here than they do on rougher textured pads.
Base
There's a reasonable amount of give when you put pressure through the mouse, and that give is usable. It gives you extra stopping power to work with, without the pad ever feeling muddy or like you're sinking into it.
How far you can lean on that depends on your skates. I often ran the pad comfortably on 4 dot skates. If you want to properly abuse pushdown as a stopping tool, you'd want more contact area, somewhere in the 6 to 8 dot range.
Personal ingame experience
The ATK A9 Mini+ has been my main on this pad, and my main overall right now. Most of my time on the pad was spent in KovaaKs, Call of Duty MW3 and MW4.
In CoD I run somewhere around 27-35cm/360. In KovaaKs I moved between 25 and 75cm depending on the scenario, and the pad handled most of that range without complaint.
The one place I ran into some issues was at the fast end. Once I got up to around 25cm/360 and quicker, micro-adjustments turned slightly stuttery. Faster pads do a better job here. Everything above 25cm was mostly fine in that regard.
Where it stands out is target switching and faster TTK games. Fast flicks with a controlled landing into a short tracking section work very well on this pad. It wouldn't be my first choice for something like The Finals, though it's still capable there, but for flick and short-track heavy games it's great.
Who this is for
- Anyone who gets on with soft bases and wants a textured, but non abrasive surface.
- Sleeve users who've written off textured pads.
- Flick and short-track heavy games, and faster TTK shooters in general.
Who this isn't for
- Very high sens players. Past roughly 25cm/360 the micro-adjustments lose some of their smoothness, and that's the nature of this kind of pad rather than a fault in this one.
- Anyone who wants a hard, 0 pushdown base.
- People who want the size. I prefer my pads at 500x450 or bigger, and 420mm of depth runs out on me in some KovaaKs scenarios with a lot of verticality at a lower sens, where I end up wanting those last few centimeters and they aren't there.
Final thoughts
AFK lands on the faster side of balanced, a small step quicker than an Artisan Zero SOFT, with a texture that never gets as abrasive as a Zero or a Hien, and it handles sleeves better than most textured cloth pads do. The base is soft in feel and unusually grippy underneath, so it stays exactly where you put it.
Is it worth 44€? Yes, on performance. My one real gripe is availability: 100 units, preorder only, gone. For a first collaboration that's very understandable, but this is a comfortable everyday pad and in my opinion it should be easier to get hold of.
So the takeaway for most people reading this is that Themasterpiece can build a surface worth paying attention to, and yoozy's first collab is a great debut and I'd love to see more where that came from!
Thanks for reading🖤