Riding a Myachi

by Crazy Ivan

Like most of the tricks in Myachi, the skate tricks grew organically from the larger movement.  We started off doing them accidentally; a toss almost always includes some kind of flip or spin to the Myachi.  It wasn't until we'd been doing it for some time that people started to point out that we were doing "skate tricks" with them.  With fingerboards just becoming popular, we cashed in on this angle and added dozens of skate-based spins and flips (along with adding the Half Pipe to tie them all together).

Shove-its, Kick-Flips, Heel-Flips, Hard-Flips, Tail Grabs, Caspers, Tre Flips, Manuals (which are as hard as you think they'd be) and Impossibles all grew from this initial inspiration.

Of course, unlike a Tech-Deck, there are no fingers riding your Myachi.  It makes all of these tricks far easier (especially since you don't have to worry about landing wheels down) so most people could pick up a repertoire of skate tricks in no time.

The drawback to moves that are easy to learn, however, is that they're not much fun to do.  It's the challenge that makes Myachi moves so fun, so once you've mastered the basic skate tricks, you don't really get much use out of them.

In an effort to add a new challenge to that genre, I conceived of a quick and easy twenty-five cent solution.  You deck just needs a passenger:

By dropping a quarter onto the Myachi, you've completely changed the game.  Go ahead and try it.  Put a Myachi in Lotus Position, drop a quarter on top of it and then try to do a 180 degree Shove-It without letting the quarter fly off.

You'll get it, and you might even get it on your first try, but you'll see the challenge as well.  This requires much more precise movements than traditional skate tricks.  If the Shove-It isn't tough enough for you, try getting a full 360 degree spin out of it.  Obviously, you can just keep adding half spins until you reach your limit.

But there's a lot more to it than that.  You can also do Kick-Flips and Heel-Flips like that.  For those, you have to go true skate-style; the quarter will have to pop off the Myachi and then land back on it after the trick.

For that, you'll need to worry about the starting position.  For the Kick Flip, you'll want to start with the quarter hanging off the wrist-side edge of the Myachi like so:

From this position, a Kick Flip will launch the quarter up and if you do it with enough control, you'll have a great shot at catching it again.  The Heel Flip is essentially the same, though you'll be doing it with the quarter hanging off the opposite side of the sack:

The key on these moves is control.  If you were just doing a Kick-Flip sans quarter, you'd probably put a ton of spin on it and actually end up with a quadruple Kick-Flip or more.  Without a quarter-rider, doing a quadruple Kick-Flip isn't much tougher than doing a single.  But when you add the passenger, things get a lot tougher.

There's no reason to stop there.  One of the coolest looking variations on this comes from the Tail Grab.  For this one, you'll need the quarter way out toward your index finger like so:

From there you can pop the Myachi up, to the Tail Grab, flip the Myachi back into position and catch the quarter.

There are a lot more tricks that can be done here.  It's extremely difficult, but you can even manage an Impossible by starting with the Myachi in the position shown above (except that you wouldn't have your pinky over top of the Myachi).  Like any new genre of tricks, the key is to get creative.  Look at the various skate moves and ask yourself how you could add a rider to them.

A word of warning, though.  Make sure you don't really need that quarter for something else.  I've lost a few bucks worth of quarters learning these tricks already.  Turns out that when you miss, that quarter doesn't like to stay put.  I've had them roll off into gutters, fly off into corners never to be seen again and bounce into bushes and disappear.  I wouldn't worry about that too much, though, as money doesn't go as far as it did back then.