I'm not sure on what you are trying to achieve here, I can't really see how animating sprites can be replaced by spawning/deleting.
My thoughts:
1- Spawn/Destroy, if you are going to spawn 72 objects in 1 frame, that may cause a significant fps drop depending on the objects.
2- Having 72 sprites on the screen is quite a bit of sprites, if you have collisions or another interaction between them, could be a problem.
3- Animating? I don't really get how it can solve your problem, do you mean moving them out of sight?
It's hard to tell you the best way without further details on the project, maybe a little more explaining or some screenshots may help.
Thanks for the help!
About the game:
It is a point and click game so collisions are already enabled. 12 different objects are showing that you each can upgrade 6 times. So in total there are 72 different objects but only 12 are showed at the same time. That is the reason there are 3 ways to do the upgrading.
animation: When object is upgrade(simple click) go the next frame of the animation.
Spawn and destroy: 72 objects on a different unused layout. At start of game spawn the first 12 objects. When you upgrade(simple click) it destroys 1 object and spawns another at the same position.
Visibility: 72 objects on the current layout. Turn visibility off for 60 objects so only 12 are visibile. When you upgrade(simple click) it will turn visibility of 1 object off and will turn it of 1 object back on.
See there are 3 ways to do achieve the same result.
The problem is there is no information about which one could be better used. It's a shame because this will probably help so many people! Especially when you work with things like upgrades.
So what do you think?