The Vortex was the Wasp before the Wasp; it was the first Roc-ish Discraft mid. They were pretty damn OS out of the box so you could torque on one pretty good. I had one I used to throw in the Winter when it got windy back in the day.
What was different was the plastic; the Vortex was a really early Discraft disc so I don't remember it being released. It was just always there. Discraft at the time had one DX-ish kind of plastic and that is what it was run in. So far as I was aware at the time, neither that plastic or DX plastic had a name, it was just Discraft plastic and Innova plastic.
Note: Discraft earlier had this bulletproof base plastic that the Phantom + was run in (the plastic that turns to dust in your hands now 30+ years later after it has broken down) that people talk about, but the Vortex was run in a more conventional DX-ish plastic. Discraft had discs like the Eclipse, Tracer, Marauder, and Shadow and they were all run in this base plastic.
Then the Cyclone came out. The Cyclone was run in a different plastic. The "old" plastic became Competition plastic and the "new" Cyclone plastic was Tournament Pro plastic. Tournament Pro didn't replace Competition plastic, though. All the older Discraft molds and the Magnet stayed in Competition plastic. Going forward the new molds like the Cyclone, X-Clone, Comet, Stratus, etc. were released in Tournament Pro plastic.
Except the Hawk and Vortex. The Hawk as mentioned was sold in both. The Vortex to my knowledge was the only older mold that they converted to Tournament Pro plastic. It wasn't sold in both plastics at the same time, but you essentially had two generations of Vortex based on the plastic.
Two problems. #1 was the Roc was king and people liked the Roc feel for mids, so people tended not to like the feel of the "new" Vortex in the hand. (Note: this was always my theory as to what there were two Hawks; too many people still wanted the Roc feel in the hand.) The discs also molded up differently, the old Vortex was noticeably flatter than the new Vortex. The new Vortex was a bit less stable than the old ones. Not enough to make them flippy junk, but... My theory on that was that the Vortex had an odd wing that was not all that durable, so making it a Tournament Pro disc helped the wing hold up longer.
So by the late 90's it was a slow selling old mold. The Comet was their new hotness midrange. They introduced the MRX in the first round of Elite Pro discs (yet another plastic with its own lineup; it was awhile before Discraft adopted the Innova "same mold in multiple plastics" idea) which was a small diameter OS mid. The Vortex was quietly dropped and no one seemed to notice or care.
Which was weird since it was still the closest thing to a Roc they had. Why they didn't promote it more is a mystery. About 5-6 years later they finally replaced it with the Wasp.
Probably the extreme concave/thin wing design doomed it as discs moved forward. Like the X-Clone, it's a design they got away with back in the 90's. Today people would howl about the durability, and I'm sure it wouldn't mold up in Z or ESP.
That's all I know about a Vortex...
Gratuitous picture of Tournament Pro Vortex:
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