My feeling about magmortar.....



Many magmortar counters exist but they all are suboptimal choices (no exception)

I find the metagame quite weird right now because it is full of semi-broken mons weak to stealth rock (all the suspect worthy lol). Magmortar is quite overwhelming right now, but banning it might not solve the problem. Tbh I'm more confortable facing magmortar than aurorus, which is actually as threatening or even more. It's not that hard to find some underrated mon able to check mortar (sligoo, solrock, carbink, hakamoO, silvally dragon spdef...) while aurorus has literally no answer except clefairy if not highrolls. But thats the problem, clefairy is quite a splashable mon, perfectly viable in balance/bulky offense, while all the things able to check mortar are definitely bad, or not worth the opportunity cost. The rise of sligoos and other poor mons is interesting because they are given a chance to shine, but it clearly warns us of mortar's brokenness. Regularly using poor mons to check a toptier or playing aggresively/sacking systematically always means the pokemon is too strong for the tier.



Not hard to check but checking it comes at a high cost

I think that we shouldn't be fooled by magmortar's apparent low staying power, because it can usually lead vs stuff like mesprit and force them to tank a fireblast, so u might think magmortar is gonna lose its momentum but it actually just heavily hurt your counter to fighting types for exemple so you are the one in the bad position. Also "being weak to rocks" isn't an argument, its neither a butterfree nor a scarf pyroar: it will take rock damage, sure, but will just oneshot something, and repeat it later on. Hitmonchan is the most viable answer to mag and barely avoids the 2hko from non specs modest. Whether is uses taunt or not i don't care, it still is impossible to wall or switch into (specs is criticized but is actually legit to deal an insane amount of damage to whatever switches into it, even with a typing resisting fire).

Sending hitmonchan on magmortar for instance just means that you have lost like 45% on it and then your oppo goes mesprit and uturns into mortar again. In the case of pyroar you can just keep a 2% hitmonchan and threaten with machpunch, but magmortar is bulkier allowing it to get extra hits. Also the firepower is quite different between those two mons.



Invalidates balance and stall (without carbink lol)

Having a pokemon able to reliably stallbreak and quite splashable like mortar is nice because using crabominable/ursaring to have a good mu vs stall isn't excatly my cup of tea. But it also roasts balance teams (s/o weezing, ferroseed, clefable, lanturn, regirock) on its own with the Z- fight set able to dismantle the cores without any effort. Balance is one of the most fundamental playstyles in pokemon and happens to thrive in balanced metagames. Balance has the aspect of stall in its ability to wall a certain portion of the metagame, while being unable to handle many threats in the long run but this is fixed by its offensive core which keeps momentum up and pressures the opponent while being able to handle threats by virtue of their typing/bulk (AV chan, aggron..). But with mortar in PU, balance becomes unable to handle one single mon from turn1 and is forced to make hyper aggressive plays; I also saw many people who decided not to set up rocks and uturn with mesprit vs the incoming mortar/ leech seed with ferroseed instead of spikes+going to clefa/gastrodon/double switches+leech chip damage throughout the game to avoid losing a pokemon which is quite ridiculous. If you can't even get rocks up because it comes at the cost of losing one mon then you can't play balance anymore.



And finally if you think aurorus is more broken, or kingler or whatever, I will just say that there are too many hardhitters in this tier and that one should leave. Otherwise see you in May's meta full of sligoo+mortar cores!

EDIT: I wouldn't have got the reqs without the use of bulletproof HakamoO resttalk+floatzel in my offense and archeops+clefairy in my balance. I let you ponder over this...