TaylorMade Spider Tour X Torched Putter Review
TaylorMade — TaylorMade Spider Tour X Torched Putter · By Troy · Aug 26, 2026
The putter Rory rode to the career Grand Slam, now at retail in the finish that made it famous.
The Big Picture
No putter has been hotter in 2026 than the Spider. By June, Spiders had won eight PGA Tour events, twice as many as any other model, and the one everyone talked about was the torched Spider Tour X that Rory McIlroy used to close out the career Grand Slam at Augusta. The Torched line is TaylorMade putting that putter on the shelf. The whole 2026 Spider Tour family now wears a torched PVD finish modeled on Rory's one-off.
They aren't literally flame-torched -- you can't do that to thousands of retail heads -- but the PVD coating fakes the look convincingly and holds up better than paint. The color is a chocolate-and-bronze mix that shifts with the light, warmer and more alive outdoors, moodier inside, with a faint purple down in the cavities. It reads nothing like the usual black or silver, and honestly it photographs at about half its real appeal. See one in daylight before you judge it.
At $349.99, in a market where $600 putters have become normal, the price helps its case. The Tour X is one of four heads, sold alongside the standard Spider Tour, the fang-shaped Tour F, and the smaller Tour V.
At Address
The Tour X is the compact one in the family, a mid-mallet that keeps the Spider outline but tightens it up. The torched crown sits clean behind the ball, and you get a choice of alignment: the wide True Path, which brackets the ball between two bold lines, or a single sight line if you want something plainer. I lean toward the True Path. The width makes it obvious where the face is pointed and easy to watch the head track back.
The compact Tour X mid-mallet behind the ball in the torched finish.
The details hold up. A textured aluminum sole plate helps it sit flat, the blue Spider accents pop against the dark head, and the deep-brown headcover with its embossed spiders is one of the nicer ones I've handled. The stock build is no afterthought either, with a stepless black KBS CT 120 shaft and a SuperStroke Pistol GTR 1.0 grip.
Sound & Feel
The white TPU Pure Roll insert, made of Surlyn and aluminum with grooves cut at 45 degrees, is still the heart of how the Spider feels, and it's very good. Impact is soft without going dead, a quiet mid-pitched note that stays the same wherever you catch it on the face. The HYBRAR Echo damper behind the face soaks up the buzz you don't want, so the feedback comes through clean.
For a mallet it feels light in the hands, but the head doesn't wander through the stroke. That light-but-planted mix took me a few holes to trust, and then I stopped noticing it, which is what you want. On fast greens the soft insert earns its keep, letting you make a real stroke on a slick downhiller instead of babying it.
Performance
Roll & Distance Control
Those 45-degree grooves grab the ball and get it rolling end over end quickly, with clearly less skid than a bare face. You feel it in distance control. Putt after putt finishes the same length, and long lag putts die at the hole instead of scattering past. I moved between greens running at different speeds and the insert stayed predictable, which matters most when you're reading a course you don't know.
Stability & Forgiveness
The Thin Wall Undercut construction hollows out the middle of the head and pushes the mass to the edges through the sole-mounted TSS weights. That's where the high MOI comes from. Miss the center and the face barely twists, so it holds its line longer and the ball loses far less distance than it would off a blade. That kind of forgiveness shows up on the card, not just the launch monitor.
The white TPU Pure Roll insert with 45-degree grooves for immediate forward roll.
One thing worth knowing before you buy: the four shapes in the 2026 family don't play the same. The standard Spider Tour keeps its weight in the back corners and feels the most mallet-like. The compact Tour X carries its weight a little further forward, so it feels a touch more responsive. The F and V move the CG forward again toward a blade-like feel. Pick the shape that matches how mallet-versus-blade you want it to play. On the Tour X itself, the choice that matters most is the neck: double bend for a straight stroke, small slant (about 30 degrees of toe hang) for a moderate arc, or L-neck for a stronger one.
How It Differs from the 2024 Spider Tour X
If you know the 2024 Spider Tour X -- the dark gunmetal mallet Scottie Scheffler rode through his 2024 run, which we review separately -- the Torched keeps everything that made it work. Same Pure Roll insert, same HYBRAR Echo damper, same TSS sole weighting, same hollow Thin Wall Undercut behind the high MOI. On the greens it rolls like the Spider you already know.
What's new is the look and the choices. The finish is the obvious one: a torched PVD built on Rory's tour putter, in place of the old dark gunmetal, and it wears better than a painted coat. The graphics are cleaner and higher in contrast. And alignment is now up to you rather than fixed, with True Path or a single long sight line and more neck-and-sightline combinations than the older model offered.
So picking between them really comes down to looks and sight line. Want the blacked-out Scheffler build? The 2024 L-Neck still delivers. Want Rory's finish and the option of a clean single line? Get the Torched.
Verdict
The Spider Tour X Torched is a proven putter in the boldest finish TaylorMade has put on a retail head. You get the high-MOI stability and the Pure Roll feel the Spider name is built on, plus enough neck and alignment choices to set it up like Rory's or Scheffler's gamer. The finish will throw some shoppers off under store lights and win most of them back outside. And at $349.99 against a wall of $600 flagships, it's one of the easier value calls in the category. If you want mallet stability without a barge sitting behind the ball, roll this one first.
