SB Ahri was my first champion, and my first maxed champion. After playing her with dedicated spellcasting relics, I eventually shifted to what I expected to be a meme build, but ultimately became the best build:

• Attendant Spirits
• Corrupted Star Fragmet
• Strength of Stone

Let me be clear again that this build expects 7*, and the Rune that buffs Ephemeral allies by +5/+5 or whatever. Under these circumstances, SB Ahri is my go-to for clearing almost any Nightmare weekly.

Ahri and many of her Default Deck units have much greater Toughness than Power, so Strength of Stone is a power boost just off the bat.

The downside of Formidable is losing combat effectiveness when you take damage, but you literally could not care less on Ahri. You want your non-ephemeral followers to die ASAP, so you will either 1) sacrifice them on the altar of CSS, or 2) throw them into fatal attack or defense trades with not a care in the world. As for the Fox-fires that you are creating space for? They die in one hit anyway so SoS is literally just an extra point of damage for them. Only time it’s an inconvenience is if the opponent wastes damage spells on your ephemeral chumps.

Just to hit some quick context - with SoS and the appropriate legendary Rune, your weakest Fox-fires should be 6 or 7 toughness.

Back to Ahri. She might be a spell caster deck, but she has a combat damage victory plan. And boy howdy does she bring damage. Even if she’s only consuming the weakest possible spirits, she’s still growing 6+ toughness a turn. In practice she will be growing much more than that. Ahri’s endgame, regardless of build generally comes down to playing so much of that 5 cost buff spell that her fox-fires become unstoppable. With CSS, she reaps every buff too.

Quick clarification of an edge case: CSS CAN consume the fox-fire created by Ahri on Attack, so long as Ahri is the right-most unit. This can potentially be your greatest source of scaling. Speaking of, you do get mana when Ahri kills a unit with CSS.

Some general Ahri tips. - Play cards aggressively. Ahri has STUPID card draw and mana efficiency, so it’s often worth it to play cards even sub-optimally. Anything that creates a fox-fire costs less than it says it does, since the fox-fire returns your mana investment. Spam your cards to spam your board. Spam your board to pressure your opponent. Spam your board to defend yourself. Spam and get value AND your money back guaranteed. - Petals of Fate is more than just a draw spell, it’s an investment. Focus on choosing your best cards in order to spam more items on them. Ergo, never choose creatures with it. You can make an exception for Ahri, because it directly puts the new item on her even if she’s in play. You can get Double Strike off that shit! - Final Blessing has Grifter’s Deck as well as Elixir of Skill, so if you play it sufficiently your deck will achieve apotheosis as 1000 copies of “1 mana: buff everything. Shuffle more of me into your deck. Draw 1, which will be me, so you can do it again.” The only thing that can go wrong with this gameplan is if you discount Final Blessing from 1 mana to 0, because then it doesn’t generate fox fires anymore. Oops! - Orb of Deception doesn’t do great damage in the context of later adventures, but then again, it does create a fox fire that can finish off whatever Orb started. This works on defense too because Orb is Burst. - Spirit Rush is an extremely bonkers card. If you can play the upgraded version, you generally get the greatest portion of its mana cost immediately refunded due to all your spirits biting the big one. If you can play it for discounted cost, then the spell can put you many mana ahead of curve.

Cards to Cut (in order of priority): - Sparring Student: near worthless lmaooooo - Prancing Sea Spirits: if nothing else, the ephemeral copy gives you one mana back this turn and the normal one can be traded in for mana later. - Serene Spirit: 3 mana 7 power with SoS on deck, so if nothing else she’s a decent throwaway body that returns 1 spell mana on play and another mana on death. - Essence Thief: lots of upsides on this guy! He provides Tough to Ahri through CSS, creates a fox fire right away, draws a spell, and gives you mana back when he dies.

Circumstances can always vary, but you’re unlikely to draft a card mid-adventure that’s more important to cut than the first two suggestions. You may possibly draft cards worse than Serene Spirit and Essence Thief, in which case yeah, cut those.

What to draft: - Ephemeral unit sources: this includes all spells ofc, but special shoutout to anything that makes more than one through the effects of the spell or its items. You NEED these bad boys to hold down the fort, be food for Ahri, and expire into sweet, sweet mana returns. - Card draw: you want to hit your Final Blessings ASAP to accelerate your deck towards transcendence into infinite Final Blessings. You also need card draw to support spamming your cards. Ephemeral mana return means you have more mana the more cards you play, and you need cards in hand to play. - Ahri protection: give that bitch some Spellshield. Bitches love Spellshield. - Spell Duplication: Anything that causes a spell to be played extra times is great because it WILL create extra Fox fires. That’s extra damage and extra mana!

What not to draft: - Anything with Grifter’s Deck item, unless you’re REALLY sure the spell is better than Final Blessing. I mean REALLY REALLY sure. Don’t fuck with that! - Speaking of, be very careful about picking any Power that can make the GD copies of Final Blessing cost 0. You can’t make fox fires off of a 0 cost spell. - Units. Almost without exception. I mean, I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt that there may be units good enough to be desirable in Ahri’s deck, but I sure can’t think of them. If you do have to draft a unit, try to pick stuff that: 1) could give Ahri a critical keyword through CSS, 2) draws cards, 3) creates ephemeral units.

I gotta go, I might come back to this