I am convinced that Mordekaiser needs a nerf. He beat me regardless of my attempts at mid. That was some of my best playing too.
Are there any counter-Mord strategies I could employ?
Mordekaiser is beaten 1v1 by either lots of DoTs to exploit his short range (Teemo and Cass are awesome against him) or repeated high burst damage (a skilled and careful Akali can usually trade equal % hp at will during levels 1-5 even with garbage runes). His main strengths are HP regen and his ability to maintain a shield, so you want to be poking at him whenever his shield is failing. In particular, if you can juke-bait his cone at you but it misses, that's an opening where his shield generation potential is down for a few seconds, which should hopefully put his shield down to about 20-30 percent. Try to go for him then and get out before his cone comes up or before it comes up a second time. Essentially your only two options if you want to chase him back to base is to either have good DoTs that work after you've backed off, or harass that comes in powerful bursts; if your character can't do either of these, ask for a lane swap or wait for a gank. As far as summoner spells, the best way to kill him is to not let him heal with his ultimate and to not let him back off when his cooldowns are going, so the standard assassin weaken/ignite is particularly good against him. Also, don't be greedy: morde is way way harder to kill than to just chase back to base, and he functions more than most champions on just farming minions; you're already hurting him plenty by forcing him out of the lane in the first place, so in general don't risk it when he's back on his turret or he
will troll you.
RE: easy surrendering, I've said this before, but it goes down when your rating gets higher. It never becomes rare enough to not be really annoying though.
7/0/35 dat shen
@katadeus there's really no point arguing on the internet about anything least of all LoL. If a person can recognize what's bad they won't be defending bad ideas in the first place. The simple fact is that changing someone's mind in half an hour is basically impossible and you're never gonna see them again anyway.
On ali I just take a spirit visage and sunfire cape and that usually does me fine until the end, when I get a lich bane 6th for some MR. If magic is really nailing me, I might occasionally grab the MR component of lich bane early, but this is pretty rare. With this high HP, decent resists, my max cooldown build, and between his heal and CC delays, it's almost impossible to catch alistar by surprise, meaning that if you die without your ultimate ever being ready, it's probably your fault for being in such a dangerous position to begin with. He's soft, but only "not main tank" soft; he definitely gets out of jams a lot easier than most off-tanks. He's just got way too much support and CC with a side of magic damage to
also be a main tank all the time; sadly many players seem to think that he's a main tank plus CC with a side of support, which leads to a lot of people acting dumb around him or complaining about him when they see someone playing him properly. And no, it's not just me, I've had to defend total strangers being hassled for playing Ali well. He just throws people a little because it's rare to see someone who's not really a main tank but can be an incredible main tank for a few seconds.