What should you cut from the Keen Engineering precon?
Keen Engineering is the Sai, Master Thopterist precon, released on October 2, 2026. We ran the stock deck through EDHTuner at bracket 2, the same check the tool runs on a deck you paste.
EDHTuner names one cut, and it rests on the deck's own counts. Here it is, with the reason it gives.
| Card | Why EDHTuner would cut it |
|---|---|
| Fall from Favor | Card advantage is part of your plan. At 19, one card there can make room for targeted disruption and mass disruption. |
Where a deck runs more of a job than EDHTuner aims for, EDHREC's play data helps pick which of those cards goes first.
The deck is short on targeted disruption and mass disruption. The tool suggests cards to add there. This page shows no adds.
How this deck works
Sai, Master Thopterist leads an artifacts deck that also leans on card draw. Its plan to win is to attack with its creatures or to drain the table. Its 100 cards include 40 lands, 10 ramp, 19 card advantage and 7 targeted disruption.
What bracket is it?
By Wizards' bracket rules, the Keen Engineering precon is bracket 1 or higher. It runs no Game Changers, mass land denial, extra-turn cards or two-card infinite combos.
The rules also ask how fast a deck wins and what it's built to do, and that part is for you and your table. The bracket checker page says how EDHTuner reads each rule.
How its counts compare
Each row counts the cards that do that job. The medians come from 18,414 public Commander decks on Moxfield, collected in July and November 2026. Moxfield puts 4,822 of them at brackets 1 and 2 and 6,057 at bracket 3. The deck numbers page says what each row counts. See how many lands Commander decks run, from the decks we counted.
| Keen Engineering | EDHTuner aims for | Median, brackets 1-2 | Median, bracket 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lands | 40 | Playtested in the tool | 36 | 35 |
| Ramp | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Card advantage | 19 | 12 | 9 | 10 |
| Targeted disruption | 7 | 10 | 9 | 9 |
| Mass disruption | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Protection | 1 | No set number | 2 | 3 |
Themes EDHTuner finds in it
EDHTuner reads a deck's themes from the rules text on its cards. These are the themes it shows for Keen Engineering.
- Artifacts
- Draw matters
All 100 cards
These are the precon's cards, grouped by what EDHTuner counts them as. Two cards show in more than one group, because each one fits more than one of them.
Show the 100 cards
Commander
| Sai, Master Thopterist |
Lands, 40 cards
| Card | Copies |
|---|---|
| Buried Ruin | 1 |
| Darksteel Citadel | 1 |
| Foundry of the Consuls | 1 |
| Island | 34 |
| Lonely Sandbar | 1 |
| Remote Isle | 1 |
| War Room | 1 |
Ramp, 10 cards
| Arcane Signet | Cultivator's Caravan | Hedron Archive |
| Mind Stone | Misleading Signpost | Ornithopter of Paradise |
| Palladium Myr | Silver Myr | Sol Ring |
| Thought Vessel |
Card advantage, 19 cards
| Adaptive Omnitool | Fall from Favor | Ichor Wellspring |
| Mazemind Tome | Mind's Eye | Padeem, Consul of Innovation |
| Pull from Tomorrow | Research Thief | Sai, Master Thopterist |
| Scrawling Crawler | Shimmer Dragon | Soul-Guide Lantern |
| Tamiyo's Logbook | Thirst for Knowledge | Thopter Spy Network |
| Thought Monitor | Thoughtcast | Vedalken Archmage |
| War Room |
Targeted disruption, 7 cards
| Aether Spellbomb | Counterspell | Duplicant |
| Launch Mishap | Meteor Golem | Negate |
| Skysovereign, Consul Flagship |
Mass disruption, 2 cards
| All Is Dust | Nevinyrral's Disk |
Protection, 1 card
| Aetherize |
Everything else, 22 cards
| Broodstar | Chief of the Foundry | Darksteel Juggernaut |
| Etherium Sculptor | Forsaken Monument | Foundry Inspector |
| Graaz, Unstoppable Juggernaut | Kappa Cannoneer | Master Transmuter |
| Master of Etherium | Memory Guardian | Myr Battlesphere |
| Myr Retriever | Nettlecyst | Propaganda |
| Psychosis Crawler | Shimmer Myr | Spire Golem |
| Steel Hellkite | Steel Overseer | Thopter Fabricator |
| Whirler Rogue |
Run it yourself
The tool opens in a new tab and runs the stock deck at bracket 2. There you also get the cards it would add and every cut it names, and it playtests each swap it suggests.
The Sai, Master Thopterist page shows what public Sai, Master Thopterist decks on Moxfield run. The guide to cutting cards shows how EDHTuner picks cuts. The precons page has every other precon EDHTuner checked.
Checked on November 9, 2026 with EDHTuner v0.248.0. The tool reads EDHREC's data each time it runs, and that data changes, so it can name different cuts than this page does. The precon's cards come from MTGJSON (MIT license). Card data comes from Scryfall and play data from EDHREC.