--- title: "Cobra 3DP MB vs Srixon Z-Forged II: one of these blades starts as metal powder" url: "https://ifrothgolf.com/read/cobra-3dp-mb-vs-srixon-z-forged-ii" type: "comparison" topic: "irons" author: "Jordan Hale" published: "2026-09-03T10:00" publisher: "ifrothgolf" --- # Cobra 3DP MB vs Srixon Z-Forged II: one of these blades starts as metal powder > Two musclebacks aimed at the same golfer, made in ways that have nothing in common. One is hammered out of soft carbon steel. The other is printed, lattice and all, and costs roughly twice as much for fewer clubs. ## In short - The Cobra 3DP MB is a one-piece head printed by direct metal laser sintering, with an internal lattice that supports the face, tunes the sound, and frees up mass Cobra spends on 54.3g of tungsten low in the head — 32.6g toe, 21.7g heel. That gives a muscleback a lower, more centred centre of gravity than the shape should allow. The Srixon Z-Forged II answers the same brief with soft 1020 forged carbon steel, no tungsten and no structure, and it reports your strike more precisely than anything else here. The gap is money: around $1,400 for the Srixon against $2,800 for six Cobra clubs, roughly $475 an iron. Buy the Cobra if you want blade shaping with a wider stable area and price is secondary; buy the Srixon if you want a blade to behave like one; buy neither and look at the PING i240 or the Mizuno Pro M-15 if fewer than half your iron shots come out of the middle. Every blade in golf has been made the same way for about a century. Take a billet of soft carbon steel, hit it hard and repeatedly until the grain runs the way you want it to, then grind the result until it looks like a golf club. Srixon still does it that way. The Z-Forged II is the current, unapologetic expression of it. The Cobra 3DP MB starts as powder. That is the comparison, and it is a more interesting one than the usual players'-iron head-to-head, because these two clubs are trying to be the same object. Same silhouette, same target player, same job on a Sunday afternoon. They disagree completely about how a muscleback should be built, and one of them costs roughly twice as much while giving you fewer clubs. ## What is actually printed, and what isn't The [Cobra 3DP MB](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/cobra-3dp-mb-irons) head is printed in one piece by direct metal laser sintering. That is worth being precise about, because 3D printing has appeared in golf before as an insert, a badge, or a small structural piece bonded into an otherwise conventional head. This is not that. The head itself comes out of the machine. Inside it sits a printed lattice, occupying the space a conventional muscleback fills with solid metal. It does two jobs: it supports the face, and it tunes what the club sounds and feels like at impact. That second one matters more than it sounds. A blade with a hollow behind the face rings like a bell, and the lattice is what stops it. But the lattice is not the point in the way the phrase "3D printed" implies. It isn't there to be clever. It is there because it weighs almost nothing next to the steel it replaces, and that freed-up mass has to go somewhere useful. Cobra spent it on tungsten: 54.3g of it, low in the head, split 32.6g into the toe and 21.7g into the heel. In a cavity-back, moving that much mass to the perimeter is routine engineering. In a blade, where there is no cavity to hide anything in, it is not. Be equally precise about what that buys. It lowers and centres the centre of gravity and it widens the stable area of a shape that has almost none to begin with. It does not turn a muscleback into a forgiving iron. Cobra's own framing is distance control rather than distance, and the launch-monitor numbers are deliberately unremarkable. Forgiving *for a blade* is a relative statement, and the relative bit is doing a lot of work. The shape is a light revision of the KING MB, reworked on Max Homa's feedback with a thinner topline and a touch more offset. It sits in a printed family alongside the 3DP Tour and the wider-soled 3DP X. Lofts run from 21 degrees in the 3-iron to 50 in the gap wedge, it went on sale on 9 January 2026, and it is sold as a six-club set. ## What forging is still doing The [Srixon Z-Forged II](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/srixon-z-forged-ii-irons) answers the same brief with none of the novelty. Traditional muscle-back, forged from soft 1020 carbon steel, compact head, thin topline, minimal offset. It is the specification a tour player would have recognised twenty years ago and still asks for now. Tour Cut grooves and a laser-milled face are the only places Srixon spends engineering budget, and both are about controlling spin rather than rescuing a miss. Soft 1020 is the whole argument for it. Blade players do not come back to forged carbon steel for performance reasons, because there aren't any worth the name. They come back for information. A forged muscleback reports where you struck it, instantly, through your hands, with a precision that no amount of internal structure improves on. For a golfer working on their strike, that report is the product. And it has no ambitions past that. No tungsten, no lattice, no attempt to make the miss survivable. Catch a Z-Forged II off the toe and you will know exactly how far off the toe you caught it, and the ball will make the same point independently. Whether that is a flaw or the entire appeal depends on why you wanted a blade in the first place. ## The arithmetic nobody puts in the headline A Z-Forged II set sits around $1,400. The 3DP MB is $2,800 and that buys six clubs, which works out at roughly $475 per iron. Golf Monthly, in a review that was otherwise admiring, called the cost prohibitive, and that is the correct word rather than a harsh one. The six-club structure deserves a second look too. Cobra offers lofts from a 3-iron to a gap wedge, so you are not just buying a set, you are choosing which six of a possible nine you want. Get that wrong and the fix is another $475. A conventional set purchase forgives an indecisive golfer in a way this one doesn't. There is also no meaningful discount runway here. The Srixon has been on the market long enough that stock moves and prices soften. A six-club printed set released in January 2026 through a custom-fit channel is not a club you wait out. ## Who each one is genuinely for The Cobra is for a single-digit player who wants a muscleback at address and has quietly admitted that a real muscleback punishes them more often than they'd like. The tungsten and the low, centred CG are the difference between a blade you play and a blade you survive. It is also, plainly, the most technically interesting iron in golf right now, and some people buy for that reason and should be allowed to. The Srixon is for the ball-striker who wants a blade to behave like a blade, and for the golfer who would rather put the difference into shafts and a proper fitting. That is not a consolation prize. Two extra hours with a fitter and a shaft that actually matches your transition will move more numbers than 54.3g of tungsten ever will. ## Who should buy neither Most people reading this, and that is not a slight. Both of these clubs assume you find the middle of the face on the majority of full iron shots in a normal round. Not your best round. A normal one, in wind, off an imperfect lie. If the honest answer is somewhere under half, the [PING i240](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/ping-i240-irons) gives you a compact players' shape with a much wider margin, at half the Cobra's money, and we've made that case in full in the [i240 review](https://ifrothgolf.com/read/ping-i240-irons-review). If your iron shots are landing flat and running through greens, the problem is descent angle rather than shaping, and the [Mizuno Pro M-15](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/mizuno-pro-m-15-irons) is the more useful conversation. The broader version of this argument lives in [you're not good enough for blades](https://ifrothgolf.com/read/youre-not-good-enough-for-blades), and it holds regardless of how the head was manufactured. ## The verdict The 3DP MB is the more impressive object and the Z-Forged II is the better value, and both of those statements can be true without either being a fudge. Printing lets Cobra put mass where a forged blade cannot, and the result is a muscleback with a stability figure that has no business belonging to the silhouette. That is a real engineering win and it is worth understanding. It is not, on current pricing, a real *buying* win for many people. Roughly $475 a club to make a blade slightly less punishing is a strange place to spend money, when the category directly above it exists specifically to make irons less punishing and does it far more thoroughly for less. Take the Cobra if you want the best version of a blade and the money is not what decides it. Take the Srixon if you want a blade, full stop. And if what you actually want is to hit more greens, neither of these is the club and both of these brands make one that is. ## The takeaway The Cobra 3DP MB is a one-piece head printed by direct metal laser sintering, with an internal lattice that supports the face, tunes the sound, and frees up mass Cobra spends on 54.3g of tungsten low in the head — 32.6g toe, 21.7g heel. That gives a muscleback a lower, more centred centre of gravity than the shape should allow. The Srixon Z-Forged II answers the same brief with soft 1020 forged carbon steel, no tungsten and no structure, and it reports your strike more precisely than anything else here. The gap is money: around $1,400 for the Srixon against $2,800 for six Cobra clubs, roughly $475 an iron. Buy the Cobra if you want blade shaping with a wider stable area and price is secondary; buy the Srixon if you want a blade to behave like one; buy neither and look at the PING i240 or the Mizuno Pro M-15 if fewer than half your iron shots come out of the middle. ## FAQ ### Is the Cobra 3DP MB actually 3D printed, or just partly? The whole head is printed in one piece by direct metal laser sintering, not an insert or a bonded panel. Inside sits a printed lattice that supports the face and tunes impact sound. The tungsten weighting — 54.3g in total, 32.6g in the toe and 21.7g in the heel — is added mass placed where the lattice freed up room. ### How much is the Cobra 3DP MB and how many clubs do you get? It went on sale on 9 January 2026 at around $2,800 for a six-club set, which is roughly $475 per iron. Lofts are available from 21 degrees in the 3-iron to 50 degrees in the gap wedge, so you choose six from a wider range rather than buying a fixed set composition. ### Is a 3D-printed blade more forgiving than a forged blade? More stable, yes, but only relative to other musclebacks. The lattice lets Cobra put 54.3g of tungsten low in the head, which lowers and centres the centre of gravity in a shape that normally cannot carry perimeter weight at all. It is still a blade, and Cobra frames it as distance control rather than distance. A cavity-back players' iron like the PING i240 remains substantially more forgiving. ### What is the Srixon Z-Forged II made of? Soft 1020 carbon steel, forged, in a traditional muscle-back shape with a compact head, thin topline and minimal offset. It uses Tour Cut grooves and a laser-milled face for spin control. There is no tungsten weighting and no internal structure, which is why it gives such precise strike feedback and why it punishes a miss. ## Products mentioned - [Cobra 3DP MB Irons](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/cobra-3dp-mb-irons) · $2,000 approx — Buy if you want blade shaping with a centre of gravity a blade has no right to have, and the money is not the deciding factor **Where to buy:** [Check price at Fairway Jockey](https://fairwayjockey.com/products/cobra-3dp-mb-custom-irons) - [Srixon Z-Forged II Irons](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/srixon-z-forged-ii-irons) · $1,400 approx — Buy if you strike it out of the middle and want a muscleback to behave like a muscleback **Where to buy:** [Check price at Srixon](https://us.dunlopsports.com/srixon/clubs/irons/z-forged-ii-irons/z-forged-ii-irons/MZFIII.html) - [PING i240 Irons](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/ping-i240-irons) · $1,350 approx — Buy if the honest answer is that you want the look of a players' iron with a wider margin underneath it **Where to buy:** [Check price at PING](https://ping.com/en-us/clubs/irons/i240) - [Mizuno Pro M-15 Irons](https://ifrothgolf.com/product/mizuno-pro-m-15-irons) · $1,500 approx — Buy if your problem is height and carry rather than shaping, and forged feel still matters **Where to buy:** [Check price at Fairway Jockey](https://fairwayjockey.com/products/mizuno-pro-m-15-custom-irons) --- Source: [ifrothgolf](https://ifrothgolf.com) — independent golf-gear editorial. 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