Pugilist V2 Distortion
The Pugilist has always been Fender's sleeper hit — a dual-engine distortion that quietly offered routing tricks normally reserved for pricey boutique boxes. The Pugilist V2 Distortion takes the concept seriously enough to give each gain engine its own footswitch, transforming the pedal from a clever curiosity into a genuine two-channel gain station. Each engine carries independent Gain, Tone and Level controls, so you can voice Engine A as a gritty edge-of-breakup rhythm tone and Engine B as a saturated lead machine — then combine them. The three-way Path switch is the heart of the design: run the engines in series for cascaded, high-gain stacking where A pushes B like a booster into an amp, or in parallel for blended textures that keep low-end definition while layering complexity — a studio trick (blending two different drive flavors) that very few pedals offer live. The Bass Boost switch fattens the bottom end for single-coil players, while the new Mid Cut option carves space for scooped, modern chug. Housed in the same compact aluminum, top-jack V2 enclosure as its 2026 siblings, with switchable buffered or true bypass, it is built for working pedalboards. The Pugilist V2 effectively replaces three pedals — two drives and a blender — and rewards players who like to experiment with gain staging. For the price of one distortion, you get a laboratory for it.
