Drop Mythic Journey review: a sturdy keyboard that can’t quite justify its price

Drop is a retailer best known for making the often-perplexing world of custom mechanical keyboards approachable to a far wider audience. Traditionally, it’s focused on individual components like custom keycaps or high-end switches, but in recent years, the retailer, which was formerly known as Massdrop, has begun selling fully assembled keyboards. These are made of similar components but come in a fully assembled and more approachable package.

The Icon collection is the retailer’s latest pre-built keyboard range. It’s split into three price tiers, which range from the relatively accessible $150 Expression series to the truly wallet-busting $499 Paragon keyboards. The Mythic Journey keyboard is from the $349 middle tier, the Signature series. It’s programmable and comes with nicer switches than the Expression that are also hot-swappable, but it doesn’t have some of the higher-end features of the Paragon.

It’s a very nice keyboard. But I don’t think it’s nice enough to justify its $349 price tag.

You can’t talk about the Mythic Journey without first addressing the elephant in the room: its price. Even by the pricey standards of mechanical keyboards, $349 is a lot, and for many people, it’ll simply be out of their price range.

But the Mythic Journey’s price starts to make sense when you look at its individual components, many of which are available individually from Drop with their own premium price tags. You could buy a keyboard and mod it with these aftermarket parts over time or buy everything upfront in one go. The Mythic Journey is built around Drop’s CTRL keyboard, which is available as a barebones board for $150. For switches, it’s using Drop’s Holy Pandas ($105 for a pack of 90), and its keycaps are DCP Pegaso ($80). Throw in a set of $25 Everglide stabilizers, and you’re looking at a combined cost of around $360 to buy the Mythic Journey’s components individually, and that’s not including the fact that Drop is hand-assembling these keyboards in the USA and sells them with a 3-year warranty.

But this isn’t a review of the Mythic Journey’s components. This is a review of the Mythic Journey, a keyboard that costs $349 as an off-the-shelf product and which therefore carries very different expectations about how functional and usable it should be.

What your $349 gets you is a tenkeyless keyboard, which means the Mythic Journey omits the numpad for a slightly more compact layout. Around the top, you’ll find not one but two USB-C ports. You can use either one to connect the keyboard to your PC, leaving the other to act as an extra USB port for your computer. It happily charged a phone I plugged in, and when I attached a second keyboard in a fit of madness, I was able to use it to type. Underneath, you get a pair of metal feet to attach and prop the keyboard up at an angle. The six-degree angle the case sits at is a little shallow, but I got used to it after a couple of weeks of use. It’s a traditional keyboard overall, without the gaskets or customizable knobs that are becoming increasingly common on modern boards.

You get a nice keycap puller in the box, as well as a switch puller, a straight USB-C cable, and a carrying case, which… fine. In terms of layouts, you’re limited to US (ANSI), so European (ISO) users are out of luck if they want access to local layouts.

The keyboard features RGB lighting, which shines both around the edge of its case, as well as behind its individual keys. But given the keycaps themselves don’t feature transparent lettering, the lighting isn’t especially visible from above. The keycaps are made of hard-wearing PBT plastic and with dye-sublimated legends, but I’m not a huge fan of their color scheme overall. It just feels like its colors are clashing a little.

Incidentally, while the Mythic Journey itself is only available in one configuration with these exact keycaps, Drop’s Signature series (of which the Mythic Journey is a part) come with a range of different keycap designs and keyboard layouts, but all broadly use the same underlying components. The Captain, for example, has a more compact 65 percent layout and retro gray keycaps, while the Ultrasonic has the same tenkeyless layout but in a chunkier case and with colorful GMK Laser keycaps. These are currently all available for $349, but Drop says future models may come with more premium designs and cost slightly more.

Source: TheVerge