TaylorMade Spider Tour X vs Scotty Cameron Phantom 12: three neck options against one, and the one is built for a straight stroke

Scottie Scheffler switched to a Spider Tour with an L-neck at the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational, and TaylorMade now counts 14 worldwide wins since, three majors and an Olympic gold among them. Rory McIlroy completed the career Grand Slam with a Spider Tour X in April 2025. Those two facts sell a lot of putters.

The Scotty Cameron Phantom 12 has a shorter story but a good one. Scotty Cameron's launch release says prototypes first appeared on tour in February 2026, and that the 2024 AIG Women's Open champion, Lydia Ko, shot 12-under 60 in her first round with one. It reached shops on 23 July as the most stable putter in the Cameron line.

Both are large, stable tour mallets. The TaylorMade Spider Tour X is around $450 and the Phantom 12 around $500. The difference that should decide it is not the badge or the price. It is the neck, and on that the two makers have made very different choices.

The neck: three choices against one

TaylorMade sells the Spider Tour X head in three hosels and publishes the toe hang for each. The L-neck has 21 degrees of toe hang and full-shaft offset, for what TaylorMade calls an arched stroke. The small slant has 30 degrees of toe hang and half-shaft offset, also for an arc, and it is the version TaylorMade markets under McIlroy's name. The double bend is face-balanced with half-shaft offset, for a straight-back, straight-through stroke. All three are 3 degrees of loft and 70 degrees of lie, in 34 or 35 inches.

Scotty Cameron sells the Phantom 12 one way: a mid single-bend shaft with full-shaft offset. Its own page describes that as minimum toe flow for players with a straighter stroke, matched to straight-back, straight-through strokes with minimal arc. There is no toe-hang option.

That makes the decision simpler than the price tags suggest. If your stroke arcs, and most golfers who stand with their eyes inside the ball have some arc, the Phantom 12 asks you to fight it, and the Spider Tour X offers two heads built for it. If your stroke really is straight, both have a version for you, and you are choosing between the Phantom 12 and the double-bend Spider.

The face: an insert against milled aluminium

The Spider Tour X uses TaylorMade's white TPU Pure Roll insert. TaylorMade describes it as a blend of Surlyn and aluminium with grooves angled at 45 degrees to get the ball rolling forward, and white so that it matches the True Path alignment on the crown. The feel brief is soft.

The Phantom 12 does not use an insert. Scotty Cameron's spec page lists a 6061 aircraft aluminium face and body with a 303 stainless steel sole and perimeter, and its release says steel makes up about 65 per cent of the head weight. The face carries Scotty's chain-link milling, which the company says reduces the contact points with the ball to soften the sound. The aluminium is there to make the middle of the head light so the steel can sit low and on the rim, which is where the Phantom 12 gets the deepest, lowest centre of gravity in the Phantom line.

One note for anyone who read our earlier Phantom comparison: Scotty's own spec page and launch release are clear that the 12 has a milled aluminium face, while the Phantom 3.2 is the one with the Studio Carbon Steel insert.

The aim picture and the fit

Both brands put the alignment aid at the centre of the design. TaylorMade's True Path system, which matches the white insert, is described as optically engineered to help you see the line and aim the face. The Phantom 12 combines a long single sight line with a T-shaped crown that frames the ball. If you have a strong preference between following a line and framing the ball, it will matter more than any other spec here, and a chalk line on a practice green will tell you in ten minutes which one you aim more accurately with.

On fit, the Phantom 12 is the more flexible stock putter. It comes in 33, 34 or 35 inches, with sole weights that change by length (two 20g weights at 33 inches down to two 10g at 35) and half-inch custom lengths for right-handers. The Spider Tour X is 34 or 35 inches off the shelf. If you need a 33-inch putter, and many golfers are on the wrong length, that is a real point in Scotty's favour.

What the tour bags say

We already counted putter brands by tour in the PGA Tour vs LPGA putter split, so here is the model-level detail, one putter per player.

The exact Spider Tour X is in 9 of the 80 tour bags we track: 6 on the PGA Tour and 3 on the LPGA. The PGA six are Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Brooks Koepka, Ben Griffin and Chris Gotterup. The LPGA three are Angel Yin, Miyu Yamashita and Julia López Ramírez. Where our rows record the neck, three say L-neck (Scheffler, Koepka and Gotterup), Morikawa's says flow neck and Yamashita's says crank neck. The last two are not among the three retail hosels, so the shop version of those two setups does not exist.

The Phantom 12 is harder to find. The only candidate in our file is Lydia Ko, whose Phantom tour prototype is described as a Phantom 12 Tour Proto or an 11R depending on the source. So the honest count is no confirmed retail Phantom 12 and one probable prototype. The wider Phantom family is well represented, in 11 of the 80 tour bags, but most of those are named tour prototypes, the pattern we covered in the tour putters you cannot buy.

That is the practical difference. When a tour player has a Spider Tour X, you can usually buy the same head, and often the same neck. When a tour player has a Phantom, you are usually buying a relative.

Who should buy which

Buy the Spider Tour X if your stroke has any arc. Pick the L-neck for a moderate arc and the small slant for a stronger one, and you are on the same head Scheffler and McIlroy putt with, at the lower price.

Buy the Phantom 12 if your stroke is straight, you want the most stable head Scotty makes, you prefer the sound of a milled face to an insert, or you need a 33-inch putter off the shelf.

If your stroke is straight and you are torn, compare the Phantom 12 with the double-bend Spider Tour X on a mat. That is the only fair fight between these two, because it is the only one where both heads are built for the same stroke.

Who should skip both

Golfers who want to take the face rotation out of the stroke altogether. Both of these are conventional mallets, and even the most face-balanced version still twists under the hands. If what you are fighting is the face opening and closing, look at the zero-torque designs instead. We compared the two leading ones in Evnroll EZPZ vs L.A.B. DF3, and the zero-torque explainer covers whether it helps.

And anyone who has never had length and lie checked. Neither head will help if the putter sits on its toe. The wider field is in our best putters guide, and the stroke-shape groundwork is in mallet vs blade.