Greetings My name is Nanjiroh. You've probably seen me around the forums or maybe you remember me from sv1(extremely small time content creator. Anyways I'm an avid dragon player(though i do play other things pretty well). From looking at various comments and threads from the new set it appears are genuinely surprised fennie is much better than people thought but many seem baffled as to why so I thought I'd share my success on the deck and some insights.

First things first. I'll share the list. Its not mine. Its from a friend of a friend(and there was a reddit post on it like 2 days ago as well), I was supposed to scrim with it today so i went to jam some games on ladder had some wild games and figured id post abour it.  

Next, I'll talk about the general misconceptions that people seem to have.  The first being marine cards. Marine stuff is extremely good and shored up a lot of the issues that ramp dragon had in set 1. Notably that we got a 5pp, and a 7pp drop that feel good to ramp into but are "fair"(relatively speaking) for both players. This shores the "how do we ramp and not die" part that players believed would happen.  Neptune in particular is ridiculous in the sense that every Neptune and merman you play represents 2 healing and board(that can trade if need be) this helps keep up in early game tempo while being relevant in the mid to late game(you can easily heal for 12 or more in this deck) the second misconception is that you Must play fennie as soon as you have 8 mana. This is honestly a case by case basis in my opinion. You're usually deciding this based off some of the following things such as are you ahead on board(believe it or not that can happen with the marine cards), how early into the game is it(you can cast fennie as early as t5 if you're going 2nd with 2 ramp cards+coin). The earlier you cast her the less likely your opponent severely punish you for playing it. You should be looking at fennie as a dragoncraft exclusive "cocytus deck" where the longer the game goes the better the value so In slow matchups yeah vs aggro no.

"How do we win" simplifying it in the ideal situation essentially Ramp->look for window to get Fennie into play->draw through deck while clearing enemy boards & presenting lethal setups every single turn(some of the boards you can make are truly ridiculous especially post 2nd fennie). In the event you can't get to fennie, usually the combination of Neptune/odin/burnite super evo can get you enough pressure and chip damage for a single genesis to get you to the finish line. And vs aggro you just look for Neptune and filene and your regular curve(only ramping once if at all) and just trying to make it to Neptune so you can turn the corner. 

Some neat tidbits. While we only have 6 true ramp cards. The addition of the coin and draconic strike let's you do some neat things to cheat(or other things into play) some examples.  If you have 2 ramp you can spell on 3(dont coin) evo Liu feng on 4, and then coin fennie on 5. Draconic strike is similiar. Most times ive usually only cast it after I get a fennie into play in the event that I somehow had 2 non discounted fennie into hand. It usually does take some time to get the fennie last but paying 6 for her is more reasonable than paying 8 as it lets you make up for the fact that she herself is otherwise a vanilla(adorable, but still vanilla) another option is using draconic strike to reduce non discounted olivia(olivia is very core to keeping the deck following since she heals/draws/has a respectable body) and lastly on filene. Speaking of filene, while I know many believed her to be broken while playing the deck ive found her spell to be just "alright" I know there's a lot of theoretical "ok but what if" and im here to tell you that so far "it won't" because the spell has a fixed cost theres only but so many opportunities you can play it+meaningful cards. And usually i found that I actually did not care what they played provided i still had draw effects in my hand cause I would just make a new board each turn. I think I would maybe feel differently if spellboost rune was more prevalent so this way i could situationally block cocytus? However most of my games were vs sword/abyss/portal(in that order).

Do I think the deck is good? Yeah of course(otherwise I probably would not play it). At the moment I think the only thing holding the deck back are that its arguably inherently heavier than previous ramp decks which makes you really really dependent on early ramp and low pressure from the opponent. And that games where you do eat that pressure and cant play fennie that you're back to doing og ramp things aka 1 big unit at a time so in the event we got more decks capable of doing that, you'll probably see a decrease in this deck. That said the games were incredibly fun and I got a load of just unhinged out of context screenshots as a result. 

If you have any comments feel free to ask I'll try and reply(the replies will be much shorter I promise)
Anyways thanks for reading seeya.

Fennie/ho chan ramp dragon write up