Sigi vs Regenyei

A comparative review of the Sigi Concept and Regenyei Trnava

It is the Christmas season in the year of our Lord 2024.

Many a HEMA fencer will of course have received new swords from their loved ones or from their own purchase. Or, perhaps, you are thinking about buying a new sword or new feder for the New Year. Our theme today is reviewing feders.

I have two I have been using lately, and this piece shall be a comparative review.

The first is a Trnava Medium, from Regenyei Armoury. The second is a Concept Shorty from SIGI Forge.

We shall be comparing these two training weapons in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of each, and what each has to offer the fencer if you choose to use it for your practice. I’ll also discuss some other factors that may influence your purchase, such as customer service and some subjective impressions about aesthetics and other aspects.

Specifications

Regenyei Trnava
Medium model
Length of blade: 96cm
Length of hilt: 30cm
Length of crossguard: 28cm
Weight: 1.45kg
Flex: Approx. 13.5kg
Point of balance: Approx. 7cm

SIGI Concept
Shorty model
Length of blade: 96cm
Length of hilt: 27cm
Length of crossguard: 28cm
Weight: 1.47kg
Flex: Approx. 11.7kg
Point of balance: Approx. 5cm

These specifications are measured from these swords specifically and may not be exactly accurate to your sword if you purchase one of these models.

Flex testing was done via the “Franklin buckling test”¹, done on my scale at home. I took multiple measurements, but I have presented the results here as merely approximate, as I was doing the test by hand and there could be user error involved.

Customer Service

Regenyei

I am quite a big fan of Regenyei’s customer service.

This particular feder was ordered as a replacement when a previous feder broke during use. I placed the order on 26 May 2024. Regenyei confirmed the order on 27 May, and the feder was ready to go by 12 July. I am in Canada and Regenyei Armoury operates in Hungary, so shipping took some time but it arrived by 20 July. The total turnaround time between my placing the order and delivery of the product was 55 days.

The customer service provided was very positive. Regenyei communicated promptly and professionally about the order. It was completed and delivered, complete and in good condition to my specifications, in a reasonable time frame.

One point I must particularly praise for Regenyei is the degree of customization you can request for their feders. This is I think a real strength of the company.

There are of course a wide range of pommel and crossguard options and aesthetic points like brassing of the hilt, all available for an additional fee.

The most significant customization though is that you can customize the proportions of your feder, for no additional fee. You can request customized lengths of blade, handle, and crossguard, and they will not charge you extra over the basic model. In my opinion, these aspects are the most significant types of customization, and having that available for no extra charge is really great value for the customer.

Sigi

My customer service experience with Sigi on this particular blade is coloured by the fact that this blade was a part of a group order. I hopped onto a group of others in the Alberta HEMA community doing a big Sigi order, and someone else was the point of contact for our order, so I had less direct experience of customer service and the delivery time was also slowed somewhat by the need for my feder to be included in this group order.

However, for purposes of more accurate comparison between an individual order from Regenyei and an individual order from Sigi, I can speak to my experience ordering a Sigi arming sword.

I placed my order for a Sigi arming sword on 10 April 2023, and they confirmed the order by email on 11 April. Unfortunately, their confirmation email was intercepted as spam by my email service and I did not receive this confirmation. They followed up on 16 July to determine whether I still wanted to proceed with the order, and their follow-up email was received normally.

After the follow-up, communication on my order was prompt and professional. I don’t hold anything against Sigi in this delay, as it was the fault of my own email service.

The Sigi arming sword was completed on 30 October 2023, shipped on 8 November 2023, and arrived on the 15th of November. There was a total of 122 days between the order confirmation and the delivery of the sword.

I would say my experience with Sigi customer service is generally as positive as my experience with Regenyei. Similar to Regenyei, they are professional, helpful, and timely in their communications and they deliver a complete and well-made product in a reasonable timeframe.

The only edge that Regenyei seems to have over Sigi in customer service is that, in my experience, Regenyei delivers faster. However, this may be a factor of Sigi having greater demand and a greater order backlog than Regenyei at this time, I do not know.

I will also say that Regenyei, in my experience, is generally more affordable on a per sword basis than Sigi.

Testing Conditions

As of the writing of this piece, I have used both of these feders for a number of months.

Both have put to use in regular weekly training and additional weekend sessions. Our training sessions at my club typically consist of one hour of structured drills or games, typically all contact exercises (e.g. We are trying earnestly to strike our partners with cuts or thrusts and must earnestly parry them), and then a second hour of freeplay. Both feders have been used extensively in this training.

I also put each feder through a competition.

I carried my Regenyei Trnava to the Ars Gladii Open in September 2024. It was used in the tier A longsword event as well as the longsword team relay, and in friendly sparring with other competitors.

The Sigi Concept was used in a local event, Return of the Goose 2024, in Edmonton, in November. I used it for the longsword open and longsword team relay events.

Both of these feders have been put to the test in both regular training and in competition conditions, and I can confidently say both are good tools for these environments. I suspect though that you are more interested in a comparative analysis, to determine which you may prefer for your own use.

Comparative Analysis

Hilts

The fencer primarily interacts with his blade through the hilt. To put it into computer parlance, the hilt is the “user interface” of the sword.

On both the Sigi and the Regenyei, I customized the hilt with a coin pommel. I made this decision on a few bases:

-My primary source, the Nuremberg Codex (Hs3227a), tells us that: “the sword is like a set of scales, so that if the blade is large and heavy, the pommel must also be heavy (just as with scales)”.
-Coin pommels appear to be among the more common types of pommel used on longswords in the late 14th and early 15th century, when I think the Nuremberg Codex was written. “Pear” pommels, as are standard on HEMA feders, are less typical of the era as far as I can tell.
-Maciej Talaga’s research on Hs3227a suggests that the “Passau type” of longsword is a likely candidate for a longsword of the right era and region to have been used by the author of the Codex², and Maciej Kopciuch’s work on Passau type swords shows they typically had large, heavy coin pommels³

So, I elected to go with a coin pommel for both of these feders.

Let’s start with a few brief notes on the coin or disk pommel. The standard pear pommel works just fine, but as noted it is one of the less common designs historically whereas disk or coin pommels are quite common. I also find that when I am fencing for long sparring sessions or for a competition day with lots of bouts, my lower hand can slip off the pear pommel when it gets sweaty. This is rather annoying and can throw you off your fencing right in the middle of an exchange.

The coin pommel, being wider than a pear pommel, more effectively locks my lower hand into place as a stopper on slipping. I don’t find my lower hand ever slips off with either of these feders with the coin pommel.

The other thing I have found that I like about coin pommels is that the wider platform they have for your lower hand also seems to improve my leverage on certain actions. Actions which involve pulling strongly on your lower hand, such as the Duplieren, feel better with the leverage offered by a coin pommel locking your lower hand into place.

I found this to be true on both these swords, neither coin pommel design seems to have any practical advantage over the other. The Sigi coin pommel has curved surfaces between the edges and the flat, which makes it a bit harder to clean, but other than there’s no real difference. Having used both of these swords for a while now, I think I do prefer the coin pommels over standard pear pommels overall, but that’s a matter of preference for the fencer to determine.

The handles of both swords are oval in cross-section, and the Regenyei tapers down somewhat towards the pommel, although I did not elect to get a waisted handle. The Sigi handle is more even and uniform from cross to pommel.

Both feders have a strong and sturdy crossguard and they stand up well under even powerful strikes. The Regenyei crossguard however flares out at either end to widen the surfaces at the ends. I prefer this crossguard feature, as it increases the surface area if you happen to accidentally punch or strike your training partner with the cross and reduces the pain and risk of injury somewhat.

Both feders also have a cord grip which comes as the standard wrap on the handle. The Regenyei cord is just a normal cord, it feels fine on the hand and provides a decent degree of grip without being sticky in the hand. The Sigi cord is covered in some kind of epoxy, which I find makes it a little bit slippery for my preference. I wrap the Sigi hilt in a layer of hockey tape for extra grip, and I do the same to the Regenyei grip but it’s much more necessary on the Sigi.

On the Regenyei hilt, I asked for a customized hilt length of 30 centimeters. On my previous Regenyei Trnava feder, a 30cm hilt length proved quite nice in handling. However, that previous feder also had a standard pear-shaped pommel. One mistake I made in ordering this Trnava was that I didn’t account for the fact that the coin pommel is shorter in length than a standard pommel, and so the same 30cm overall hilt length results in a longer handle and shorter pommel than I actually wanted.

This isn’t a deal breaker by any means, it’s a relatively minor point. My preference is for a shorter hilt and gripping with the hands together. Again, this is following the instructions of Hs3227a, which calls for the fencer to “grip it [the sword] with both hands between the guard and the pommel”. If you don’t follow this source and aren’t interested in such gripping, then this length may not matter to you. But for me, I find the hilt space on this Trnava a bit excessive and I may want to get a shorter hilt on a future model.

The Sigi came with the standard Shorty hilt of a 22cm hilt and a 5cm coin pommel, for an overall length of 27cm. This hilt is indeed shorter than the Regenyei and keeps my hands locked close together. I like the hilt on the Sigi, especially after improving the grip by the aformentioned hockey tape wrap, but I also find that it may be a smidge too far in the short hilt direction.

When I am wearing my fencing gauntlets, which make your hands bigger, the hilt on the Sigi is a bit overly crowded and tight and I find my lower handle drifting down onto the pommel, which may not matter to you but is not the instructions my source gives. As well, the crowding of my hands does sometimes impair certain movements which involve the crossing of your arms.

The Regenyei being too long in the hilt and the Sigi being just slightly too short, on my next feder I may elect for a hilt of 28 or 29cm overall. But if you’re not a weird 3227a obsessive like myself, I think you will find either of these hilts perfectly suitable for fencing. The only notable flaw in either hilt is the rather slippery cord grip on the Sigi, and that can be easily amended with a wrap of hockey tape or something similar.

Blades and Handling

This is the area where these two feders differ the most substantially. At the same time, my views on the handling of a sword is necessarily subjective and preferences on swords do differ from fencer to fencer. I will endeavour to communicate the differences as clearly as I can, but it is much harder to speak about swords in writing than it would be for you to feel them in your hand and feel the difference yourself.

This Regenyei Trnava, of all the feders I have used, feels the most similar in handling to my sharp longsword. For reference, my sharp is an Albion Crecy⁴. The Trnava has a similar blade-forward feeling in the balance in the hand, probably caused by its point of balance of 7cm from the crossguard according to my measurement.

The upshot of this is that when I want to fence with a blade that handles very similarly to a sharp longsword, the Regenyei Trnava is very well suited for that use.

The Trnava blade has a distinct parallel edges design. The blade is of uniform width from the schilt to the tip. It does distally taper in thickness, the blade becomes thinner further down the weak, but it remains the same width overall.

This means you have more material at the weak of the blade than other comparable feders will do, meaning more mass behind a cut or thrust and more mass behind a parry even fairly far down the blade. You still need good mechanics and leverage in a parry, you can’t cheat and parry with the weak, but parrying strong blows is a bit easier with the Trnava I find.

The downside though is that it can also strike quite hard, and could therefore be a hazard to training partners or competitive opponents. I find I have to be much more measured about my own power and intensity when using the Trnava, lest I hit too hard.

This is the medium model of the Trnava, and it comes with Regenyei’s medium blade flex. Local flex testing found that this Trnava flexes at around 13kg. Generally it is quite forgiving in the thrust, more so than stiffer blades like the Regenyei Strong model. It is still however stiffer than a Sigi Light or the other lightweight feders now hitting the market.

My Sigi Concept, in contrast, feels much lighter in the hand than the Regenyei. This is rather paradoxical since it’s actually slightly heavier overall than the Regenyei. I think the explanation is due to the balance. The point of balance I found to be around 5cm from the cross. This balance is more towards the hilt than the blade and the blade feels more agile and nimble in the hand as a result.

Unlike the parallel edges of the Trnava, the Sigi blade tapers towards the end, in both width and thickness. As you get further towards the weak, you have less material in the blade. This also contributes to that nimble handling, and reduces impact on your training partners to some extent.

To date myself with a pop culture reference: Fencing with the Sigi Concept after having used the Regeneyi makes me feel like a Dragonball Z character who has just discarded his training weights. I feel faster. I don’t believe this is due to a difference in overall weight, I think it’s due to the different balancing of the blade.

Being more blade-light than the Regenyei, I also feel I can fence at a higher level of intensity with the Sigi with less risk to my training partner. Note that I say less risk. You still definitely need to use reasonable control and be mindful of your partners with either blade, but you can relax that a little bit more with the Sigi.

The flex on Sigi blades is one of their more renowned features, and my Sigi Concept did not disappoint in this regard. It buckles around 11-12kg as per my local testing. In use, I was able to land thrusts to the hands, arms, chest, and neck of multiple opponents with no issues for excessive force.

One more minor difference between the two is the shape of the schilt. The Trnava schilt has more pronounced “shoulders”, which often succeed in catching blades on the schilt. This is sometimes an aide in protection to your hand and thumb. The SIGI Concept has a rounded schilt, which brings blows down towards your crossguard. In this aspect, the Sigi is a little closer to a schilt-less sharp longsword, and in my fencing I find with the Sigi I must be more diligent in parrying to protect my hand.

In regard to the points of the blade: The Sigi comes with a flared tip, the Regenyei has a standard rolled tip. Generally I don’t find there to be too much difference between them. However, I do think that the rolled tip of the Regenyei glances off the target more often because it is more round, whereas the flared tip on the Sigi will tend to catch. From a safety perspective, I think glancing off is better, particularly on the faces and throats of our training partners.

Some people have told me that the rolled tips of Regenyei feders break and become sharp or jagged and pose a safety risk. I have been fencing with Regenyei feders for about a decade at this point, and have literally never had this happen. But I have heard reports of it. Make of that what you will.

Tactical Differences

What differences in tactical preferences arise from these differences in handling?

On the whole, most longswords are going to be more similar to each other than different. That being said, the subtle differences in handling between these two do lead me into different “modes” of fencing between them.

The blade-forward balance and stronger striking of the Regenyei I find leads me to seek out binds and opportunities for thrusting plays a la Czornhawe-ort. When an opponent does a mirrored cut with me, such as Czornhawe vs Czornhawe, I often will win the resulting bind. Sometimes I can break straight through and strike to their head regardless of their cut. Binding aside a blade and thrusting to the chest with a lunge or pass also works well, especially if the bind can be maintained. The Regenyei also feels like it rewards sweeping parries like Krumphawe or Streichen, where the percussive force of the blade is advantageous for striking aside an incoming threat.

The tactical weaknesses of the Regenyei also arise from the handling though. In particular: The heavier and more forward balance of the sword makes recovery into guard from an attack marginally more difficult. It is all too easy to overcommit to a beat or strike too hard and be unable to recover in time against the opponent’s stroke. It’s only a small difference in absolute terms, but that tiny difference can mean you get hit against a skillful opponent when with a lighter blade like the Sigi you may have been able to recover and parry in time. You have to be measured in your actions with the Regenyei, I find.

While the Regenyei Trnava excels in binding and beating, the more hand-favouring balance and the more agile blade of the Sigi Concept rewards back and forth parry-riposte tactics in the middle distance. If you have ever watched sabre fencers have a long rally of attack-parry-riposte-parry, that is the sort of thing I find most advantageous for the Sigi.

Twerhawe and the famous “Liechtencopter” work well for the Sigi Concept, and I especially find it is very good for landing a cut and then immediately recovering into a parry against the incoming afterblow.

The lighter blade does require you to be solid with your structure and mechanics for parrying, as it is a less forgiving of a lazy parry than heavier blades will be.

There is also a pitfall in the light blade though. You can recover more easily and more quickly than with the Trnava, but because you can it is also easy to overestimate and become overconfident in your ability to recover. Whereas the heft of the Regenyei makes me conscious that I need to be measured, the lightness of the Sigi sometimes leads me to overcommit in situations where I shouldn’t. Pride goeth before the fall, as they say, and sometimes I get myself whacked when I think I can out-speed a situation due to the light Sigi blade when in fact I can’t.

I should emphasize however: What one of these swords can do, the other can also do. The tactical differences arising from their differing handling are ultimately pretty subtle. You won’t find yourself unable to parry an afterblow with the Regenyei, or unable to bind and thrust with the Sigi, but the handling differences do create marginal differences in emphasis between the blades. They can make certain situations or certain actions easier or more difficult for you.

Ultimately, fencing is about the fencer more than the blade and the blade is just a tool. However, different tools will lead into different approaches and I hope these impressions can give you some ideas of how each of these tools can enhance aspects of your own practice.

Applications of Use

For myself, I expect that I will be using these two feders in the following ways for training in the coming months and years:

I think the Regenyei Trnava will be a better tool for in-club training and sparring with fellow experienced practitioners, especially when I am honing in on specific tactical and technical ideas from Ms3227a. The more sword-like handling I think makes it a better training tool for that purpose.

At the same time, the more blade-heavy balance and potentially greater impact demands greater control, and poses greater risk. For those reasons, I would be somewhat hesitant to use this as my main tool for competitions (although I may do so in events like AGO’s tier A longsword, working against other experienced competitors) and would not generally use it as a tool for drilling newer students.

The Sigi Concept I think will be better for sparring and training with newer students, and especially for one on one lessons with students where I may be throwing high volumes of attacks at them, especially thrusts given its excellent flex. I also think it will be a typical competition tool for me, as the more blade-light balance makes it more agile in the hand and feels like a lighter impact on other fencers as a result. In competition, I think I would favour the Sigi in unsorted open events with a range of competitor experience.

For those unfamiliar with these models, the Sigi is on the left and the Regenyei is on the right.

Aesthetics

Finally, a few entirely subjective comments on aesthetics:

Both of these are good looking feders, and the craftspeople who produced them clearly put a lot of pride and effort into their creation.

The rounded schilt and narrow blade on the Concept give it a sleek and modern aesthetic. It reminds me of a foil or sabre of the modern types, or something in that design tradition. It’s design to me makes me think of swiftness and agility.

The Trnava has a wider, more squared schilt and the parallel edges of the blade, which overall makes it look more hefty and solid. Overall, the Trnava’s look to me suggests power and strength, and it makes me think more of a sharp sword.

Both of these feders have some cool details on their schilts to add to the visual interest of the blade. They do look good, but these details also add nooks and crannies to the surface of the schilt. This makes them a little annoying to get into when you’re polishing your blade.

Conclusions

I can firmly recommend either of these feders. Both Regenyei and Sigi have good, reliable products with good customer service.

Regenyei has a cheaper product, with an excellent array of customization options, and in my experience it is delivered faster.

Sigi costs a little more, but the balance and flex of Sigi blades are rightly renowned for being safer and lower impact on your training partners.

If you are looking for a feder which handles closer to a sharp longsword, and you’re an experienced practitioner interested in exploring fencing with a “closer to sharp sword” tool which is still safe for working with other fencers, I would without hesitation recommend the Regenyei Trnava.

If you’re a competitor looking for a light, agile longsword, or a coach who needs a tool for drilling and sparring with students with less impact, the Sigi Concept Shorty is a great tool.

I hope this short comparative review was helpful to you. I plan to do more reviews like this, from time to time, when I find gear or swords which I feel I have some opinions to share.

1. Standards For HEMA Testing – Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Blade Flex

2. In search of the sword of the "Nuremberg Codex" (3227a)

3. Art of Swordmaking: 14th C Passau Sword

4. Albion: The Crecy