2017-01-30 A Single Midrange? I am fully convinced of the bag building concept described in MindBodyDisc's ``Your Starting Lineup'' article. [0] You start with a small set of 3-5 discs, which you base your bag upon. Only if you know every flight detail of these discs, you add another disc (one at a time) to cover any shots your starting lineup can- not cover. This way you end up with a small bag that consists of a few core discs you use for most of your shots, and a couple of auxilary discs for those remaining shots your starters aren't good at. Still, I'm having problems finding such a small set of starters when I want to include drivers. My idea of what a bag has to pro- vide is more like: - one putter - three midranges (overstable, stable, understable) - two fairway drivers (overstable, stable) - one windfighter (really overstable fairway driver) - one roller disc (understable fairway driver) - one max distance disc This makes nine discs ... or rather molds? As I'd want at least two putters of the same type, and the one or other backup, maybe. Currently I'm only covering the slower part of the list. My only fairway driver is a Teebird. Concerning putters, I'm becoming more and more sure that I want to stick to the P2 only. For a driving putter I rather pick another (maybe S-Line) P2 than a Pure. The idea behind that is, that although I'll use the putting and driving putters for dif- ferent purposes, it might be more helpful if both have a similar flight pattern, instead of getting used to another flight pat- tern. The different P2s will likely fly a bit differently anyway, but with the same character, I believe. But concerning midranges, I'm puzzled currently. I do have a Buzzz, a Comet and a Roc, at the moment. Each of them flies dif- ferently. The Buzzz and Comet are more similar, but on the other hand, most people put the Buzzz and Roc into the same category (though the Comet not). Okay, I agree that both of them fly straight for the high-speed part of the flight, but their fade is much different. If I want to have a disc without the hard fade at the end (e.g. for tunnel shots) I need something besides the Roc, being it the Buzzz or the Comet doesn't matter that much. Yesterday I read a forum thread, [1] suggesting a so called ``garu bag'' (named after the poster), consisting of a putter, a midrange, a fairway driver and a windfighter. The first post linked two older articles. [2] [3] All of that makes the impres- sion of thoughtfulnes and good advice. They suggest to play with small bags that you know really well. There are two aspects, how- ever, that I don't fully understand, at the moment. The first be- ing the focus on drivers, the second being the use of only a sin- gle midrange. In my stage of development, I use no drivers at all. The only one I have is a Teebird, which I only start to learn using. In my (little) experience, using this disc does not improve my tech- nique in the same way as using my midranges. And for the worse, it does not give me more distance. (My max distance disc backhand is the Comet, only overhead I can throw the Teebird a little bit farther.) In my eyes, drivers are useful for some scenarios. One being the need for more distance. Currently I'm not able to get more distance out of my driver (maybe that'll improve if I have some driver that turns a bit). As, with reasonably good tech- nique, one is able to throw 80m with the putter and 120m with the midrange, I can play most holes with them alone. This appears to be positive, for putters and midranges provide more control than drivers. Two being the use of drivers for rollers, because their weight is located more at the rim, which makes them more stable rollers. And third is drivers for forehand and overhead throws, because their more shallow rim feels better in the hand. My bag is currently centered around midranges, not around drivers, whereas theses online sources suggest to have more drivers than midranges. This might come from the conception that if you birdie a hole, you'll first throw a driver and then your putter -- no need for midranges. (Thanks to Dion Arlyn for this view point. [4] ) If you play like this, I do understand that there's more need for drivers than for mids. My playing, at the time, is more like mid-mid-putter or mid-putter-putter ... or worse. ;-) Maybe this is the key idea: Have some variety in your main disc category and streamline all the other ones. Hence, if you center your game around drivers, then have overstable, stable and under- stable ones there, but concentrate on single midranges and putters. Or, if you center around midranges, then have the variety there and have single driver and putters. Then there is this other thing I don't understand: The single mi- drange. To be clear, One needs to differ between discs and molds. It seems most don't do this and that might cause some irritation for me. If one says that the Roc is his only midrange, that doesn't mean he has a single Roc in his bag (besides a backup, perhaps). It'll rather mean, he has a bunch of Rocs, in different states of wear in his bag. Now, if you throw, for instance, DX Rocs, you'll have to cycle them through quickly, but it also means that you'll at any time have both, rather overstable Rocs and rather understable Rocs. Although it's one mold, you have quite different discs. Let's compare that to the Buzzz. (There were those Roc vs. Buzzz competitions, which the Roc won.) I read that Discraft plastics don't wear that fast, and even much slower if you have premium plastic. Now, let us assume, one uses an ESP Buzzz as his mi- drange, how can you compare that to a bunch of DX Rocs? Having multiple ESP Buzzzes doesn't change a thing, they'll be just backups, without adding the same variety to the game as the Rocs do. (I assume that, because I don't have made this experience on my own, I just read a lot what people wrote.) Thus, is it more of a ``If you throw Innova, then use a single mold of midranges, meaning a set of Rocs of different wear'', vs. ``If you throw Discraft, then you'll need more molds, because you don't cycle through but rather take one or the other''? Thus am I to choose between Zone-Buzzz-Comet and Roc-Roc-Roc? But why then are three Rocs (1 mold) considered better than the Zone-Buzzz-Comet combi- nation (3 molds)? This I do not understand? It's three pieces with different flight lines in each case. Are those that write these articles just too deep into the Innova-midset? Maybe they should not talk about molds at all, be- cause a mold seems to mean quite different things for Innova and Discraft and for baseline and premium plastic. They should rather talk about single discs (excluding only backups, i.e. identical flight characteristics). Because if you have only one mold of distance drivers, which is a Destroyer, maybe even only Star Des- troyers, but you have six pieces of them, each with a different flight characteristic, you simply shouldn't call them a single mold. (Six different Star Destroyers are not exception -- just watch those in the bag videos!) I do suggest, those talking about minimal bags stop talking about molds but start talking about pieces. That will be more helpful. [0] http://mindbodydisc.com/your-starting-lineup/ [1] http://www.dgcoursereview.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32790 [2] http://www.discgolfreview.com/resources/articles/choosingadisc.shtml [3] http://www.discgolfreview.com/resources/articles/discoverlap.shtml [4] http://youtu.be/0hhSA97miOs http://marmaro.de/discgolf/ markus schnalke