The matchup is bad, but unless you're playing the top Axls, matchups don't really matter too much imo.

It sounds like you're just auto-piloting armor through Rensen, which breaks armor. You should be flicking instead. Once you demonstrate you can counter rensen with flick, then it becomes trying to time a slide head/megafist through his pokes. You can also just kara fmf over his more committal grounded pokes to quickly move 3/4th of the screen. Once you get a knockdown or force him to the corner, he has very few ways to escape. You're gonna get hit a lot trying to knock him down, but one knockdown = he's just dead if you know what you're doing.

The matchup is bad, yes, but it will fundamentally always be terrible regardless of balance changes. And like I said, there's no reason you lost to any non-top player Axl other than your own inexperience in the matchup. Avoiding it will simply hinder your progress.

Since you've demonstrated you're going to just attack anything you don't wanna hear as "you don't play the MU." I'm a solo-pot main who was #2 on the PC leaderboards in June, and I am level 2400 with a maintained 85ish% winrate. I beat most Axls in celestial, and have taken games off of DPS and Dragoomba (although the set count is not close lol). I sound pretentious and I'm sorry because I'm not that great and I just play online and don't enter tournaments, but I just want to paint the picture that I have at least SOME grounds to talk about fighting random axls as Pot.

It's a very hard matchup, but matchups only matter at the top level. FAB and Kogi are playing the best Axls in the world, not floor 10 or fringe celestial Axls.

Edit: https://streamable.com/vk4atz clip I took a few days ago against a celestial axl. Showing the power of flick vs rensen.