Spire Mechcycle

Crew 2 and exhaust pull in opposite directions, and that friction is the design's engine. Crew wants a body tapped to animate the Vehicle; the exhaust ability instead demands another untapped Mount or Vehicle, spent once per object, paying out a +1/+1 counter for every other Mount and Vehicle you control the moment you fire it. A wide board of trucks and steeds turns the 5/4 base into something monstrous; a lonely one barely moves it. The clever part is that the payoff scales off the board you already committed without needing a lord or an anthem to reward the go-wide plan: the counters read your battlefield directly. The exhaust cap is what stops this from becoming a grindy value loop. A single copy fires exactly once, so the decision collapses into timing: hold the animation until the turn your Mount and Vehicle count peaks. (A second Spire Mechcycle, or a copy that blinks and returns as a new object, resets the clock and gets its own activation, which is a corner the "only once" language quietly permits.) Both crew and the exhaust animation resolve at instant speed, so the counters-loaded Vehicle can ambush an attacker or connect through a tapped-out opponent, and haste means it swings the turn it lands rather than waiting. What emerges is a finisher wearing the clothes of a payoff card: a Vehicle whose reward for the deck is simply being a Vehicle deck, cashed in once per copy for maximum effect.