Precon Upgrade Guide
Keen Engineering Upgrade Guide
What to cut, what to add, and how to play the mono-blue artifact precon from the Foundations Commander decks, commanded by Sai, Master Thopterist.
Picking this precon up?
Shown here is the commander's card art, not the box.
Buy Keen Engineering on TCGplayer →Quick verdict
Keen Engineering is the most engine-like of the five Foundations decks. Sai turns every artifact you cast into a 1/1 flier and every two artifacts into a card, and about half the 99 either counts your artifacts or cares that you have a lot of them. That gives a new player something genuinely satisfying to learn — a board that visibly gets better every turn — while keeping the decision list short. Its weakness is fragility: the deck's biggest creatures have power and toughness equal to your artifact count, so one board wipe can turn three good turns into nothing.
TurnZero rates Keen Engineering a 3 out of 5 on strength and a 2 out of 5 on difficulty — one thing to keep track of, and that thing is a number you can see on the table. See it alongside every other precon we cover on the precon directory.
How the precon plays
Sai, Master Thopterist makes a 1/1 flying Thopter whenever you cast an artifact spell, and turns two artifacts into a card for {1}{U}. The deck is built so that both halves are always live: there are more than thirty artifacts in the 99, and the Thopters Sai makes are themselves artifacts, so the sacrifice outlet never runs dry.
Master of Etherium , Darksteel Juggernaut , Broodstar and Kappa Cannoneer are the payoffs for a high artifact count, and Etherium Sculptor , Foundry Inspector and Shimmer Myr are what let you deploy several artifacts in a turn instead of one. Thopter Spy Network is the deck's best card: a free Thopter every upkeep, plus a card each time your artifact creatures connect. Vedalken Archmage does the same job from the casting side, drawing off every artifact spell.
The deck defends itself unusually well for a beginner list: Propaganda makes attacking you expensive, Padeem, Consul of Innovation gives every artifact hexproof, and Nevinyrral's Disk is a reset button you can hold when the table gets ahead.
What works out of the box
Thopter Spy Network ↗
A Thopter every upkeep and a card every time the fliers connect. The closest the deck has to an engine that wins on its own.
Master of Etherium ↗
Grows with the artifact count and hands every other artifact creature +1/+1, turning a board of 1/1 Thopters into a real clock.
Padeem, Consul of Innovation ↗
Hexproof on every artifact answers targeted removal outright, and the upkeep draw is usually live.
Kappa Cannoneer ↗
Ward 4, grows on every artifact that enters, and can't be blocked the turn it grows. Genuinely hard for most precons to answer.
Steel Overseer ↗
Puts a +1/+1 counter on every artifact creature each turn — the fastest way a pile of Thopters becomes lethal.
Nevinyrral's Disk ↗
A wipe the deck can build around: Padeem and Darksteel Citadel survive it, and Sai rebuilds the board faster than anyone else at the table.
What needs improvement
Ramp is thin for a deck with this many six- and seven-drops. Sol Ring , Mind Stone , Thought Vessel , Hedron Archive and three mana Myr is a reasonable start, but Myr Battlesphere , Meteor Golem and Broodstar all want more than the base list reliably produces. See the Mana Rocks Guide →.
The bigger issue is that the deck's best creatures are also its most fragile: a board wipe hits Master of Etherium , the Thopters and Broodstar at once, and the artifact count they all read collapses with them. The upgrade path is protection and recursion rather than more payoffs. See how many board wipes a deck should expect →.
10 cards to cut
Each of these has a real function. None of them earns its slot in this specific 99.
All Is Dust is a seven-mana wipe that destroys your own colored permanents and leaves the table's colorless ones alone. In a deck whose commander is blue, it is a symmetrical sweeper pointed the wrong way.
Scrawling Crawler draws every opponent an extra card each turn for one life apiece. Three cards to the table per turn cycle is not a trade this deck wins.
Tamiyo's Logbook costs {5}{U} to activate before reductions. Even with five other artifacts out, that is two mana for one card at sorcery speed.
Misleading Signpost redirects a single attacker once. A political trick, not a card this deck's plan needs.
Aetherize bounces one attacking player's whole team, which is excellent about one game in six and dead the rest.
Memory Guardian is a 3/4 flier with no text once it lands. Affinity makes it cheap; it still does nothing after it enters.
Spire Golem is the same card with worse stats and Affinity for Islands instead.
Silver Myr taps for one blue mana and dies to everything. Palladium Myr earns its slot; this one doesn't.
Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut costs eight and rewrites your whole board into 5/3 Juggernauts that must attack — which undoes the Thopters' evasion and the artifact-count creatures' stats at the same time.
Soul-Guide Lantern is graveyard hate in a pod that may have none worth hating. Keep it in a sideboard, not the 99.
First upgrades
Budget, first
Efficient Construction ↗
Redundancy for the commander: a 1/1 Thopter every time you cast an artifact spell, so the board keeps growing while Sai is off the table.
Chief Engineer ↗
Gives every artifact spell convoke, so the board of 1/1 Thopters pays for the deck's six- and seven-drops. Two mana that fixes the ramp problem outright.
Whir of Invention ↗
Tutors any artifact straight onto the battlefield at instant speed, and Improvise means the deck's own board pays for it.
Next
Sword of the Meek ↗
Cheap equipment that comes back every time a 1/1 enters, which is every artifact spell you cast.
Trading Post ↗
Turns dead artifacts back into cards and creatures, and gives the deck a sacrifice outlet that isn't Sai's.
Cyberdrive Awakener ↗
Animates every noncreature artifact as a 4/4 flier for one turn — with this many artifacts it is a one-card finish.
Swan Song ↗
One-mana protection for the engine pieces the deck cannot afford to lose.
Higher-investment
Rhystic Study ↗
The format's best pure card-advantage engine, and blue's answer to a deck that otherwise draws only when its fliers connect.
Mystic Forge ↗
Casts artifacts off the top of your library. In a deck this artifact-dense it is a second hand.
Urza, Lord High Artificer ↗
Makes a Construct that grows with the artifact count, taps artifacts for mana, and digs for more. The strongest single upgrade this shell can take.
Win conditions
The upgraded deck still wins in the air: a wide board of Thopters, an anthem from Master of Etherium or counters from Steel Overseer , and Thopter Spy Network refilling the hand while they connect. The upgrades add a second route — a drain outlet so the token board wins without needing combat, and Cyberdrive Awakener as a single card that converts a table of artifacts into lethal damage out of nowhere.
The upgraded 99, in shape
The finished list keeps everything that counts artifacts and cuts the cards that don't interact with that count: the vanilla Affinity bodies, the symmetrical draw, the political tricks. In their place go protection for the engine, a tutor that finds the right artifact, and a way to convert a wide Thopter board into damage that doesn't have to get through blockers. The deck plays exactly as it did out of the box; it just stops losing three turns of work to one sweeper.
Who should buy this precon
The best fit for a new player who wants a deck that builds something rather than one that just attacks — the artifact count going up is visible, satisfying feedback, and it teaches the idea of a payoff without asking for complicated sequencing. It is a weaker fit for someone who dislikes being the table's archenemy: a wide board of evasive fliers behind Propaganda draws attention whether or not you're ahead.
Track how the upgrades actually perform.
TurnZero HQ keeps a win rate per deck version, so you can change ten cards, play ten games, and see the difference instead of guessing.
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