Not every AIXO shouts. The Pastel De Mint is the calm one – a cool, minted colourway on the Ghost platform: T700 carbon face, 16mm cold-pressed core, around £30.
It suits a particular sort of tennis player: the one who plays in club whites, keeps their bag tidy and wants their first pickleball paddle to feel considered rather than loud. Happily, the playing character matches the aesthetic. The 16mm core gives the softest, most cushioned response in the range – the paddle equivalent of a comfort-strung frame with a dampener in – and the wide sweet spot means your first hundred dinks land on something forgiving while your contact point settles.
Control is the whole philosophy here. Pickleball's soft game – dinks, drops, resets – is played with relaxed hands and short movements, closer to how you would feather a drop volley than how you would drive a forehand. A thick-cored carbon paddle like this one makes those shots learnable, because the face grips the ball just long enough for you to feel what you did. Beginners get forgiveness; improvers get a paddle that never overhits under pressure.
When your third-shot drive starts demanding more reward, AIXO's thermoformed Scorpion tier is the natural upgrade. Until that day, the Pastel De Mint is a genuinely lovely place to learn the sport – and it photographs disgracefully well beside a matching overgrip.
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Shop the AIXO Ghost Pastel De Mint at Central Tennis
In stock now at Central Tennis. Expert stringing and racket fitting available in store.
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