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JWestland
Lower drag is what you want. There's no way to guess whether a deeper rim will reduce drag without looking at the shape, some ~50mm wheels are faster than some other ~80mm wheels.
Reducing the spoke count does reduce drag, all other things being equal, although some tests suggest rapidly diminishing returns once you get below 20 spokes. Aero spokes probably make more difference than spoke count, since a circular cylinder with its axis perpendicular to the flow is a truly horrible shape.
The magnitude of the gains available isn't as large as wheel manufacturers would like you to think, the very best front wheel is only about 15W better than an Open Pro with 32 round spokes at 50km.h-1, which is well worth having on a race bike but are you actually going to ride at 50km.h-1? At a more realistic tooling-around pace of 30km.h-1, the gain becomes more like 3W