Destruction Spire

Welcome to the spire side. I think a lot of the suggestions that Arrow gave below are very good, and I will echo them in my comment. But first I want to tell you I think you have a great start. That being said, I think there are three areas that we can improve on: Reliability of getting the engine card, draw/filtering in order to get the most advantage we can after spire shadows and payoffs that win the game quickly, to capitalize on that advantage. You can also look through some old spire decks I have posted to get some ideas. The first is a grindy deck, the second is more of a combo deck: Expedition Destruction Spire and The Merriest Mandrake Combo.

The way I approach building these kinds of decks, is by first analyzing the engine card/s. So, I'll start with some conceptual points about Spire Shadows:
- Spire Shadows is the kind of card that can only be played once in a game. (technically 3 times would have the same effect)
- It only affects cards in our deck, so we'll need a way to dig for our well costed cards to get an advantage
- A cost advantage can only be capitalized in the next few turns from when Spire is played. So we need to find a way to close out the game before it goes very long. Essentially, if we have 6 power in a turn, it doesn't matter very much if we can save 5 power on our unit, because we still have 5 more unused power that turn. So our advantage would only be very marginal. Marisen is a great example of this concept. In essence that card does the same thing* whether it costs 4 or 8. If we play a 4 cost Marisen on turn 8, then we are really not capitalizing on the benefits we got from spire.

There are so many suggestions I can make for improvements, but I want to keep them relatively conceptual and not tell you to minus these 20 cards, add these 20 cards.

With the above points considered, we need to be playing spire in the market. Fire offers us the best market spell for getting to our engine, with Blazing Salvo. It's the "best" market spell due to its cost. It would allow for Spire to be played on turn 3 ideally. From my past experience with these decks, we really want to have played spire by turn 4 every game, so then we can look at merchants to help in addition to the salvo. Likely want to be playing 8-12 market effects to get to spire.

Moving to the second part, we need to get to our well costed cards quickly and efficiently. On the one hand, we can use cards like Arrow mentioned bellow, and those would work great. On the other hand, they aren't complimentary to Spire Shadows effect. Since they are not affected by the cost reduction, putting too many of those types of cards in our deck would dilute the power of Spire Shadows. There are draw engines that I think can work in destruction influence as well as xenan influence. You can see both in the decklists I posted above but to summarize here, Merriest mandrake is great before Spire and incredible after spire, but requires a huge commitment in the deck. Cards like Aurelian supplier fit the same slot, being great before spire and even better afterwards.

Lastly, moving to payoffs. The biggest notable one I can mention is Sol's Rest. There are cards like Azindel, the wayfinder that can help you have a lot of power, but 8 power is also relatively accomplishable, when your auralian merchant costs 0. The idea behind the cards is that you use sol's rest to get an extra turn and return everything back to players' hands. You can immediately play all the 0 drop units, one of which is merchant, which allows you to go to market again. This kind of approach can win against certain types of decks outright. Ones that would be playing out their units in order to win, because you really stress the amount of power advantage you got from Spire, often playing 4x more cards in a turn after. It's less effective against all spell kind of decks, because they are using their resources differently. I used talir's unwinding to follow up the sol's rest in the merriest version, but have since printed a mono time version of that card that does a very similar thing.


Hope this all helps you with your Spire Shadows adventures.