Set Muscle

Every brand is pushing creatine HCL, 'micronized', buffered, ethyl ester, whatever. They cost two or three times more than plain monohydrate. Is any of it actually worth it or is it marketing?

Monohydrate. It's the most studied supplement on the planet and the fancy ones have never beaten it in a head to head. Save your money and buy the big tub of mono.

This is the correct answer and it's not close. The only real argument for the others is if mono genuinely upsets your stomach, and even then the fix is usually just taking it with food, not switching forms.

I have heard people say mono bloats them, is that a real thing?

It's mostly the loading phase. If you slam 20g a day for a week some people hold a bit of water in the gut. Skip loading, take 5g a day, and it's a non-issue for almost everyone. You'll just saturate in 3-4 weeks instead of one.

I ran HCL for a while because a mate swore by it. Felt identical to mono and cost me double. Went back to mono and noticed precisely nothing. Pure marketing in my experience.

The 'buffered' and 'ester' versions actually performed slightly worse in some studies because part of the dose degrades. So you're paying more for potentially less. Monohydrate is the benchmark everything else is measured against.

One tip - get a brand with the Creapure label if you want to be sure of quality. It's just German-made monohydrate but you know exactly what you're getting and it's still cheap.

Does timing matter? Pre, post, doesn't matter?

Doesn't matter. Creatine works by saturating your muscles over time, it's not an acute pre-workout thing. Take it whenever you'll remember it daily. Consistency is the only timing that counts.