Keen Engineering Upgrade Guide: 17 Easy Changes You Can Make

Sai, Master Thopterist | Illustration by Adam Paquette

Starter Magic products can be sketchy. Anybody remember the starter decks with trash rares? Luckily, the Foundations Commander line has proven itself reliable: They’re all decent, straightforward decks with simple themes and great reprint value for an MSRP of $30.

Keen Engineering might be the most complicated of the lot because it doesn’t rely on creature typal synergies, but it still enacts a simple gameplan under the watchful eye of Sai, Master Thopterist. These upgrades polish the card quality so your artifice gleams as it wins the pod.

Keen Engineering Deck Overview

Keen Engineering is a blue artifact deck with Sai, Master Thopterist in the command zone. As the commander suggests, it wants to cast artifacts to build up a large board of thopters, with Sai supported by cards like Thought Monitor and Research Thief to reward going wide with artifacts.

Magic: The Gathering Foundations Commander Deck - Keen Engineering | 100-Card Deck + Accessories

• WELCOME TO THE MULTIVERSE—The perfect way to start playing Commander with your friends. Bring this 100-card deck to the table and square off against up to three other combatants!
• THRILLING MULTIPLAYER BATTLES—Battle your friends with powerful creatures and spectacular spells in Commander, Magic’s most popular multiplayer format
• DESIGN THE BLUEPRINT FOR PAIN—Work with Sai to engineer useful artifacts and generate flying thopters as a bonus. Make unexpected plays and draw additional cards to let the cogs of your strategy click into place!
• FOIL LEGENDARY CARD—Every Foundations Commander Deck includes 1 Mythic Rare Legendary Creature card with a shiny Traditional Foil treatment to command your deck in style
• CONTENTS—1 ready-to-play Keen Engineering Foundations MTG Commander Deck (100 cards), 1 deck box, 10 double-sided token cards, 1 strategy guide, 1 reference card

$42.95

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Upgrade Plan

What I want to commend the FDC decks on the most is their straightforward gameplans. A historical weakness of precons has been too many themes crammed into a single box, so most upgrades are about removing them and picking a lane. But these decks (and recent precons in general) have done a great job streamlining their focus, so they play better out of the box and upgrades focus on power, not theme.

With all that in mind, these upgrades aren’t meant to replace what Sai does but enhance it. There’s some filler and outdated tech to trim and staples that deserve a slot. The only critical weakness I’d say I’m patching is a lack of targeted removal, and that’s only a few slots.

Skullclamp

Suggested Cut:

If you only listen to one upgrade in this guide, it should be this one: Add Skullclamp. It’s a cheap artifact that adores 1-toughness creatures like thopters. Even if you have an anthem out, you can still attach it to a Thopter and sacrifice it to Sai.

Mind's Eye is a Commander classic, but it’s entirely outdated and out of place. Five mana for an artifact that requires a constant mana investment is pretty poor by today’s standard, plus Mind’s Eye was never really a blue card. It worked best when other colors lacked good card draw, but those days are behind us.

Stridehangar Automaton

Suggested Cut:

Stridehangar Automaton is perfect here: An artifact for Sai that makes thopters and improves the ones it generates. With the reprint quality of these decks, I’m rather surprised it wasn’t here in the first place.

Wizards crams Shimmer Myr into every artifact deck, despite its relative uselessness. Sure, sometimes you get your opponent with an instant-speed Myr Battlesphere as a blocker, but it’s mostly a weak body if you don’t have specific synergies with it.

Sharding Sphinx

Suggested Cut:

Like Mind's Eye, Steel Hellkite is a relic from a more civilized era of Commander, when threats could be slow. If you play Sharding Sphinx with a Thopter or two in play, they immediately propagate, so it does something the turn you play it.

Geist of Saint Thalia

Suggested Cut:

Mazemind Tome can help decks in desperate need of card selection, but here, it’s just a filler card added because of the artifact type. While Geist of Saint Thalia isn’t an artifact, its mana advantage is significant enough to warrant its inclusion.

Forensic Gadgeteer

Suggested Cut:

Tamiyo's Logbook takes a while to get humming. While Forensic Gadgeteer also needs a moment, it actively adds to the artifact count and benefits a handful of other cards in the deck. It’s also useful if you want to bump the power level with infinite combos.

Phyrexian Metamorph

Suggested Cut:

Spire Golem might be the weakest individual card in the deck. Way better to replace it with artifact all-star Phyrexian Metamorph, a copy of the best artifact or creature on the field. It’s cheap and effective, and it has the relevant card type—what more could you want?

Cryogen Relic

Suggested Cut:

I wholly understand the need to interact with your opponents, but I find that Negate rarely cuts it; it’s too inflexible, especially considering your opponents almost always have one critical creature worth countering.

Cryogen Relic is among the best artifacts printed in the past few years. It draws two cards for cheap and has the artifact type, and it’s decent in this deck specifically because Sai can sacrifice it.

Sewer-veillance Cam

Suggested Cut:

Memory Guardian was a swell card in Aetherdrift Limited, but Commander demands much, much more of its card. Sewer-veillance Cam might be the second-best artifact of 2026, and it deserves a slot in this deck, even without infinite combos.

Emry, Lurker of the Loch

Suggested Cut:

Launch Mishap falls into one of the classic traps: It’s a weak card being run because it says the thing the deck does. In this case, it makes a Thopter. That’s not nearly enough, and a deck that wants to tap out as often as this doesn’t want to hold up this much mana.

Emry, Lurker of the Loch works much better in the deck. You can set up card advantage engines by using this to rebuy Cryogen Relic as Sai sacrifices it, get back that Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut your opponent countered, and so on. And if you find Sai too fiddly and low-power as you grow as a player, it makes for a powerful commander later down the line.

Cyberdrive Awakener

Suggested Cut:

Blue artifact decks often turn to Cyberdrive Awakener to win the game. It makes your random trinkets into lethal drones, and is several times more effective a finisher than Broodstar. Something really cute you can do is sacrifice it to Sai, then rebuy it with Emry if your initial assault didn’t go as planned.

Idol of Oblivion

Suggested Cut:

Idol of Oblivion pairs perfectly with Sai. Importantly, it doesn’t need to see the token being made, so you can cast this, trigger Sai, and activate the same turn. I much prefer the consistent, long-term advantage and meaningful type it has, both traits that make me want to run it over Thirst for Knowledge.

Retrofitter Foundry

Suggested Cut:

Darksteel Juggernaut makes sense in a deck that wants to go wide with artifacts but a lack of trample makes it dull. Retrofitter Foundry is amazing with Sai because it upgrades thopters into constructs for no additional cost.

Uthros Research Craft

Suggested Cut:

Uthros Research Craft fits the deck perfectly as an artifact-based card draw engine that also scales with the size of your board.

I don’t hate Whirler Rogue, but the deck doesn’t have flicker effects to maximize it, and I wanted to keep the artifact count relatively high.

Leonardo da Vinci

Suggested Cut:

This isn’t a Propaganda deck without planeswalkers or enchantment synergies, so why not snag another finisher? Leonardo da Vinci does two excellent things: First, it makes your thopters large enough to comfortably win the game. Second, it’s a cheat of sorts with the activated ability. Cards like Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut and Forsaken Monument have significant enough textboxes that you don’t mind the weenie form.

Pongify

Suggested Cuts:

My problem with Aetherize is similar to Launch Mishap: This deck wants to tap out, not hold up mana. Especially not this much mana. Pongify is just far easier to weave in with your other spells.

Desynchronization

Suggested Cut:

Nevinyrral's Disk is another terribly awkward board wipe. Because your opponents see it coming, they can sandbag threats, and you lose everything, not just creatures. You need to be so far behind for this to be useful that you might as well scoop anyway.

Desynchronization basically ignores every card in the deck. It’s not a perfect one-sided sweeper since lots of other players will have historic permanents, but it’s a good deal better than the Disk.

Unctus, Grand Metatect

Suggested Cut:

This one’s probably the strictest upgrade since Unctus, Grand Metatect is Chief of the Foundry with an extra toughness and more text.

The Final Deck and New Cards

Here’s the final decklist, plus just the upgrades in a decklist below. If you want to pick them up, use the shopping card button in the corner!

Commanding Conclusion

Thopter | Illustration by Svetlin Velinov

I’m extremely pleased with how Wizards handled these precons. Great reprint value and focused enough gameplans that upgrades don’t fix, they just improve, are everything I want from a precon. I hope to see this attention paid forward to more complex precons in the future; if Star Trek precons look as good as Keen Engineering, I’ll be happy to see them.

How would you upgrade Keen Engineering? Do you plan on picking up any of the FDC precons? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord! And for more from us, subscribe to our newsletter, The Daily Upkeep.

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