Chase The Spire

Saw this list the other day and thought, "there is no way that is optimal." I had tried Give Chase + Spire before Battle Lines but came to the conclusion that it wasn't good enough. Give Chase has two big problems. If you play it and the opponent is not dead, you have to pick up the units played by Chase so you can't set up blocks for return swings or use Chase to build up your board to overwhelm a board stall and Give Chase doesn't bottom or discard the cards it surveys for units which means your next few draws are watered down after chase pulls units from the top 5.

The author of that rank 1 deck correctly identified that recruit solves these two problems by itself. When you Chase a recruit unit, if it recruits for a lower cost unit you'll play it to the board meaning you can actually set up blocks when you're not able to kill them. It also starts recruit chains, and with a Patrice on board, all of the chained units will have charge, so you'll be able to kill with Chase more often than before. And, recruit bottoms the cards it sees. So when you hit a recruit off of Give Chase you'll get to clear all the misses from the top of your deck, where Chase would normally leave them up for you to draw dead after your big turn.

The main issues I had with the aforementioned list was A) overly ambitious influence requirements. Deck was on 9 total pips, mostly stretching way too far for Diana. B) some very medium unit choices (deeptrail vanguard, Xenan Lifespeaker, scornful elite, karmic guardian????), awkward power/influence fixing (petition, trailmaker), and sub par merchant selection (Auralian merchant is amazing, this should ALWAYS be in your spire decks full stop).

So, I've stripped all of the crazily influenced cards down to a simple FFTJJS influence base making give chase very easy to land with a reworked power base and that means we can just maindeck 4 copies instead of running a mediocre merchant for spire so we can grab it from market and then attempt to deeptrail it back for more value later. Also remove all the units that are extremely unimpressive post spire to make the Give Chase turns as powerful as possible.

No doubt the author of the linked deck was onto a strong synergy between spire/chase/recruit, but this list feels like a streamlined and much more optimal take on the idea.