Top Exclusive Items to Land in BattlBox

Most of what lands in a BattlBox, you could find somewhere else if you went looking. That's fine. A good fire starter is a good fire starter no matter who ships it. But every so often a mission includes something you can't get anywhere else, and those are the pieces members are still talking about years later.

Scroll back far enough in the members group and you'll see it. Someone posts a knife with a worn clip and scuffed scales, and the comments fill up with people who still carry the same one. That rarely happens with generic gear. It happens with pieces that came with a story, and most of those stories start with an exclusive.

So I went back through a handful of them to look at why they stuck and what made them ours.

What "exclusive" means here

The word gets used a lot in this industry, so I want to be specific. When we call something a BattlBox exclusive, at least one of these is usually true:

• It's serialized, so the number on yours belongs to you and nobody else.

• A real knifemaker, guide, or instructor designed it, put their name on it, and brought it to us first.

• Members got it in their boxes before anyone else could buy it.

• It was a limited run. A couple of the knives below are already gone.

Some of the pieces here fit one of those. A few fit nearly all of them.

Pocket knives

Mission 58 brought the WE Knife 704X BattlBox Exclusive. WE Knife is known for fit and finish that usually costs a lot more than what showed up in that box, and for the 704X they took one of their proven platforms and reworked it for us. The blade is hollow-ground D2 with a bead-blast finish and a slightly upswept tip that helps when you're slicing instead of pushing through material. It opens fast and closes smooth on a ceramic ball-bearing pivot, and it locks up with a liner lock inside textured G10 scales over a stainless frame with a reinforced steel insert.

The blade is 3.5 inches, the knife is 8 inches open, and it weighs 3.7 ounces with a tip-up stainless clip. It came in red, black, or blue, packed in a zippered nylon case, so WE clearly expected people to keep it rather than toss it in a junk drawer.

The steel was good, but the bigger deal was that a respected manufacturer agreed to build something just for our members instead of us pulling whatever was already sitting on a pallet. A lot of what came later started with the 704X.

Jump ahead to Mission 121 and the Glow Rhino Fermi 2 went in a completely different direction. Glow Rhino builds around tritium, and the Fermi 2 has a self-powered tritium insert that glows on its own. No batteries, no charging, no leaving it under a lamp. Drop it on the floor of your tent at 2 a.m. and you can find it, which sounds minor until you've spent a few minutes patting around in the dark.

The rest of it is built for everyday carry. It has a 3 inch D2 drop point with a black PVD coating to cut glare and resist corrosion, G10 scales with enough texture to hold when your hands are wet, a liner lock for one-handed use, and a deep-carry tip-up clip that keeps it low in the pocket. It's 7 inches open and just over 3 ounces. You'll forget it's there until you need it, and you won't find it for sale anywhere outside BattlBox.

Numbered blades

Anyone who has watched Doug Marcaida put blades through their paces on TV knows who he is. Fewer people know how the Doug Marcaida Serbian Cleaver: Grande Fratello got to us. Doug brought the design to Blade Show, our team saw it, and we knew almost right away it needed to go in a box.

Grande Fratello is Italian for "big brother," which fits. It's a bigger take on Doug's popular Dart design, with an 8.5 inch blade of 420 stainless, 12.25 inches overall, and a full pound of knife riding in a top-grain leather sheath. Around camp it's a cleaver in the literal sense. It breaks down food, splits kindling, and handles the kind of chopping that chews up smaller blades. Doug also designed it with his self-defense background in mind and vetted it personally for that role, so it's more than a heavy kitchen tool.

Every Grande Fratello that went out in Mission 107 is numbered. The design was made exclusively for BattlBox subscribers, and members were the first people anywhere to own one.

The Condor Sip Knife Limited Edition from Mission 111 is a quieter knife. Condor built it to celebrate their 20th anniversary, and each one carries its own serial number. It's a 4.5 inch SAE 1095 blade on a full tang with a walnut handle, 9 inches overall. Jimping on the spine gives your thumb somewhere to sit for fine work like carving feather sticks. It also has a lanyard hole and Condor's classic leather sheath with a belt loop, which is about what you'd expect from a company that has spent 20 years making tools for people who actually go outside.

1095 is a steel people either love or haven't used enough. It's tough, easy to touch up in the field, and yes, it will patina if you give it a reason. I think that's part of the appeal. A serial number doesn't make the steel any harder, but it ties one specific knife to one specific person, and on a carbon steel blade the darkening ends up as a record of everywhere you've taken it.

A guide's knife from Alaska

Russ Kommer has spent his life as a big game guide in Alaska and as a custom knifemaker, and the Ketchikan by Russ Kommer feels like it was designed by someone who has had to work on an animal in the cold. It went out to members in Mission 115.

It's a small knife, with a 2.75 inch mirror-polished D2 blade, a 4.25 inch handle, and 7 inches overall. In the right hands a short blade does more controlled work than a long one, and the build supports that. The handle is paper micarta over a tapered tang with vulcanized paper spacers, so it balances well and holds its grip in rough conditions. The top-grain leather sheath works for traditional or scout carry, hanging vertical off the belt or riding horizontal across your back. It's made in the USA.

If someone asked me what a named-designer exclusive looks like when it's done right, this is the knife I'd hand them. Russ's name isn't a sticker on the packaging. You can see decades in the field in the shape of it.

Blades you watched get tested

BattlGames gave us a different kind of exclusive, and I think it's one of the better things we've done. Instead of just telling you a knife performs, we put it in front of a competition and let you watch.

The Crowell Competition Knife is from Master Bladesmith James Crowell and comes straight out of BladeSports competitive cutting, where a blade has to take rope in a single swing and get through precise cutting courses with no second chances. It's a 10 inch 5Cr stainless blade with a G-10 handle, 14.5 inches overall, about 18.8 ounces, carried in a leather sheath. It shipped in Mission 119 and showed up in the final episode of BattlGames, and if you watched, you saw why competition geometry works for chopping and slicing well outside a competition. It's sold out now, as exclusives tend to be.

The BattlBolt Fixed Blade Knife debuted in the same Season 1 finale, during the last knife skills challenge, and it's a Doug Marcaida design from start to finish. Doug is a judge on Forged in Fire, the founder of Marcaida Kali, and a military veteran, and you can see it in the layout. Aggressive serrations on the spine handle survival work, the straight tip is built for thrusting, and the long edge is made for slashing.

It's 13 inches of D2 tool steel, 18.5 inches overall, with an FRN handle that doesn't care what the weather is doing, and it weighs 1 pound 7 ounces. That's a lot of knife, and it still balances well for its size. It'll clear brush and split wood, and it covers the defensive side Doug designs everything around. Mission 127 was its first release, and subscribers had it before anyone else.

Seven very different knives

Put these seven on a table and they don't look like they belong together. A 3 inch tritium folder sits next to a 13 inch fighter, and mirror-polished D2 sits next to walnut and 1095. One was shaped by the Alaskan backcountry, another by a competition cutting stand.

What they share is that somebody committed to each one. A designer put their name on it, or a manufacturer agreed to build something they won't sell anywhere else. On a few, we stamped a number into the steel so it would mean something to whoever opened the box.

I've tried to get every spec right, because you should know exactly what you're carrying. But when members bring these knives up, they rarely talk about steel. They talk about the BattlGames episode where they watched one cut, or the trip where theirs picked up its first real scratches.

If one of these is sitting in a drawer at your place, take it out this weekend and use it. That's what it was made for.