Vader – Psilocybe cubensis Hybrid (Melmac × Blue Meanie)

Vader – VDR

Introduction
There are strains you make for the lab, and then there are the ones that make you. Vader was the latter. I created it in 2018, working out of a small lab in Austria; the kind of place that smelled faintly of agar and burnt coffee, where winter light came in cold and blue through the windows. It was quiet there, but my head wasn’t. I was chasing something bigger than genetics, I was chasing understanding.

The cross was deliberate: Melmac × Blue Meanie, brought together through anastomosis, a controlled act of fusion, not unlike what was happening inside me at the time. The duality. The dark and the light. The part that destroys and the part that rebuilds. What emerged from that work was Vader, a strain that demanded respect the moment it began to fruit. Thick, sculpted stems, wide gills, and spore loads so heavy they turned the workspace violet. It was beautiful in its intensity.

When Vader finally dropped in 2019, it felt like more than a release, it was an exorcism, a surrender, a nod to every late night where I stared into the plate wondering if I was getting closer to mastery or madness. It remains one of Basidium’s most iconic genetics because it carries both precision and poetry. Vader isn’t just a strain, it’s the reflection of what happens when you meet your shadow in the lab and decide to make something from it.

Vader is both a genetic creation and a personal reflection; a symbol of finding equilibrium through the duality of life.