underspin to topspin mindset

The mentality that we used to have in the past was to open with a safe, spinny loop with good placement, try to gain an advantage with that spinny loop and then try to follow up with powerloops to place pressure on the opponent. 

The problem with this approach nowadays is that the slow spinny loop is way less dangerous due to the plastic ball (i think?), and you've just given your opponent way too much time to react. Also the timing is such that after a safe, spinny opening loop it's quite hard to stay close-table, the usual way is to retreat to mid distance to allow more time for the powerloops to follow. 

Now with the plastic ball, I find that it's actually more possible now to use a different strategy. Instead of doing a big stroke to lift underspin with a lot of shifting the centre of gravity upwards from a very low position, I think it is a lot more viable (now that the ball loses spin fast) to simply use minor changes in racket angle to simply loopdrive underspin balls without waiting for the ball to drop, similar to what you would do against topspin. So instead of training that extensive soft-spinny loop -> loop battle strategy and get moved around by good blockers, you always start with a loop-drive, and follow it up by more loop drives at close-mid table, which you can gain an advantage decisively because once you don't need to go so low for the soft spinny loop you can recover a lot faster. Also, consecutive loopdrives to different positions are a huge killer as very few people can deal with that.  

I've started to try that, it's more inconsistent compared to the safe spinny loops but it shows some really great potential in terms of reclaiming the threat of attacking first.