Science! precon upgrade guide

Thirty-six of the ninety-nine cards in this box are artifact spells, and every one of them hands Dr. Madison Li an energy counter. Getting the energy was never the hard part.

Spending it is. She has three abilities and every one of them opens with {T}, and you untap once a turn, so the deck banks counters far faster than she can ever convert them. Two of the fifteen swaps below exist to raise that ceiling. The rest go after the two other things the box left half-finished: a graveyard that five of its own cards keep reading and almost nothing fills, and a mana base that spends nine of its lands doing nothing on the turn they arrive.

Five cards read your graveyard and two can fill it

Her third ability is the one worth building around. Five energy, no mana, return an artifact card from your graveyard to the battlefield. That is a reanimation spell stapled to a commander, and it costs nothing you were spending anyway.

The box clearly knows it. Buried Ruin buys an artifact back to hand, Arcade Gannon casts one straight out of the yard once a turn, and Open the Vaults and Wake the Past are both mass artifact reanimation. Counting Dr. Madison Li herself, five cards want artifact cards sitting in your graveyard.

Two cards in the box can put them there more than once. Liberty Prime, Recharged wants {2}, a tap and an artifact to eat. Arcade Gannon taps to draw and discard, which is the same card that wants to cast the thing back. Everything else is a single trip: Mind Stone and Wayfarer's Bauble sacrifice themselves, Treasure Vault sacrifices itself, and Thirst for Knowledge and Unexpected Windfall are instants you cast once and are done with.

So the marquee ability spends most of the game pointed at an empty graveyard, and the box’s answer to that was two sorceries at six and seven mana. I would rather fill the yard early and cheaply and let the free ability do the work.

Emry, Lurker of the Loch mills four on the way in and taps to cast an artifact out of the yard, and with 34 artifacts in the upgraded list her affinity usually makes her a one-mana or two-mana play. Goblin Engineer searches an artifact card directly into your graveyard, which in this deck reads as a tutor: find the piece you want, then spend five energy putting it onto the battlefield. Sai, Master Thopterist turns two spare artifacts into a card, and the two artifacts land where you want them.

Goblin Engineer is $9.76, which is the second-priciest thing I am recommending. Daretti, Scrap Savant does a rougher version of the same job for $2.01, rummaging every turn and returning an artifact for a sacrifice. If the Engineer’s price puts you off, take the planeswalker and buy the Engineer later.

What are the best Science! upgrades?

Fifteen cards, in the order I would buy them. Fourteen of them come to $41.41 at market for default printings. Chaos Warp’s default printing has no market price listed, so treat that total as a floor.

1. Thousand-Year Elixir ($14.80). The single best card for this commander. Creatures you control can use their abilities as though they had haste, so Dr. Madison Li converts the turn she resolves, and {1}, {T} unlocks a second activation every turn after that.
2. Illusionist's Bracers ($6.49). Copying an activated ability does not make you pay for it twice. Three energy draws two cards. Five energy returns two artifacts.
3. Goblin Engineer ($9.76). An artifact tutor that puts the card in the only zone this commander can reach for free.
4. Emry, Lurker of the Loch ($0.63). Mills four, casts artifacts out of the graveyard, and costs about one mana here.
5. Adarkar Wastes ($0.39), Battlefield Forge ($0.46) and Shivan Reef ($0.35). All three colour pairs, all untapped, $1.20 for the set. A point of damage is a fair price for a turn.
6. Harnessed Lightning ($0.26). Removal that pays you three energy before it asks for any, so the worst case is that you spend nothing and bank three.
7. Sai, Master Thopterist ($0.70). A flier for every artifact spell, and a sacrifice outlet that draws cards and stocks the yard.
8. Generous Gift ($0.71) and Chaos Warp. The box has one answer that hits a nonland permanent of any kind, and it is a land that sacrifices itself.
9. Whirler Virtuoso ($0.25). Three energy for a 1/1 flier, at instant speed, with no tap and no mana. It is the card that keeps energy useful on the turns she is not on the battlefield.
10. Spirebluff Canal ($4.57) and Inspiring Vantage ($1.88). Untapped on the turns that decide the game, tapped on the turns that do not.
11. Aether Hub ($0.16). In most decks this is a rainbow land with one charge. Here it recharges every time you cast an artifact.

Everything the fifteen replace is further down.

One untap step, three abilities asking for it

Dr. Madison Li reads like three cards. One energy pumps a creature and gives it trample and haste, three energy draws a card, five energy reanimates an artifact. All three start with {T}, and you get one untap step a turn.

That is the whole ceiling. The box gives her 36 artifact spells to trigger off, and 12 other cards in the upgraded list can spend energy on their own, so income was never going to be the constraint. What she can do with it is capped at one activation a turn, forever, unless you change something.

Thousand-Year Elixir changes it twice over. Its first line lets you use abilities as though the creature had haste, so she converts the turn she lands instead of the turn after. Its second line untaps a creature for {1}, which is a second activation every single turn. Nine other creatures in the upgraded list have an ability with {T} in the cost, so it is not a one-card combo piece, it is a deck-wide unlock.

Illusionist's Bracers gets there by a different road. It copies the activated ability rather than granting another one, and a copy does not re-pay the cost. Three energy for two cards. Five energy for two artifacts back. Measured in energy per card, the Bracers is twice as efficient as any amount of untapping, which is why it beat Magewright's Stone onto this list. The Stone unlocks the same second activation, costs $10.81, and makes you pay the energy again.

Whirler Virtuoso is the third answer and the cheapest. It does not touch her at all. Three energy, a 1/1 flier, at instant speed, whenever you like. The box shipped exactly one outlet of that shape in Automated Assembly Line, and one is not enough for a deck that can bank a dozen counters by turn six.

Nine lands enter tapped and three of them earn it

Nine of the box’s 37 lands enter tapped no matter what. Three of those are Razortide Bridge, Rustvale Bridge and Silverbluff Bridge, and those three stay. They are artifact lands, which means they turn on metalcraft for Dispatch and Brotherhood Scribe, and they count themselves for Robobrain War Mind. A tapped land that is also a permanent your deck counts is paying for its turn.

The other six are not. Irrigated Farmland, Temple of Enlightenment, Temple of Epiphany, Mystic Monastery, Path of Ancestry and Myriad Landscape all cost you a turn and give back a scry or a cycle. Path of Ancestry is the clearest case: no creature type in this deck reaches half the creatures, and nine Humans out of 24 means its scry misses more often than it hits.

In their place, three painlands and two fastlands cover every colour pair, and Aether Hub covers the rest. The Hub is the one worth explaining. Normally it taps for any colour exactly once and then it is a Wastes. In a deck whose commander hands you a counter for every artifact you cast, it taps for any colour as often as you can spare one, which is most turns.

The swaps take lands that always enter tapped from nine down to three, and untapped lands from 24 up to 28. Red sources go from 24 to 26, and the double-red check on The Motherlode, Excavator and Unexpected Windfall improves from 75.3% to 79.8% by turn four.

Blue gets very slightly worse, and I would rather say so than hide it. Sources drop from 28 to 27 because two of the lands I cut made blue and the replacements lean red, so the double-blue check by turn three moves from 78.5% to 76.4%. If that bothers you, Seachrome Coast is $0.44 and takes the slot Inspiring Vantage has.

Eight answers to a permanent, four without a condition

The box ships three cards that unconditionally destroy or exile a permanent you point at: Swords to Plowshares, Crush Contraband and HELIOS One. Generous Gift makes four, and four is still under what a Commander deck wants.

The rest of the interaction has a clause attached. Dispatch only exiles if you control three artifacts. Chaos Warp shuffles the permanent away and can hand back a replacement off the top. Bottle-Cap Blast wants five mana or a board of artifacts to tap. Harnessed Lightning is worth only as much energy as you can spare.

And that last point is the real one. Look at where this deck’s removal actually lives. HELIOS One asks for X energy. Behemoth of Vault 0 asks for energy equal to the target’s mana value when it dies. The Motherlode, Excavator asks for four energy to blow up a land. Three of the deck’s answers are priced in energy, which means removal is competing with her draw ability and her reanimation ability for the same pool. That is a fourth claim on a resource that already had three.

So Generous Gift and Chaos Warp are here partly because they are good and partly because they are not energy. Harnessed Lightning is the exception that proves it: it hands you three counters before it asks for any, so it is the one removal spell in the deck that leaves the pool bigger than it found it.

An Equipment that charges rent on the deck’s own resource

T-45 Power Armor gives a creature +3/+3 and stops it untapping, then charges you an energy every upkeep to undo the drawback it just created. In a deck where every counter has three or four better homes, paying rent to fix your own Equipment is the worst line on any card in the box, and it is the first thing I cut.

Overencumbered is next. It enchants an opponent, hands that opponent a Clue, a Food and a Junk token on the way in, and the attack tax it imposes is optional for them. Expert-Level Safe is a guessing game with an opponent over cards you already own. C.A.M.P. costs {3} to cast and {3} to fortify before it does anything at all.

Nerd Rage is $3.28 and draws two cards, which is a fine rate, and then asks you to hold ten cards in hand for the rest of it. This deck draws 11 cards’ worth and spends every one. Mechanized Production is $3.97 and needs eight artifacts sharing a name to win the game. The upkeep copy is real value and I am not pretending otherwise, but it is an Aura on a permanent, so one removal spell takes both cards, and four mana that changes nothing on the turn you cast it is a lot to ask of a deck this eager to deploy.

Sentry Bot is five mana whose entry trigger and cost reduction both scale with how many creatures are attacking you, which is a card that reads best when you are losing. Open the Vaults returns artifacts from every graveyard, including the three you are trying to beat. Wake the Past is seven mana for a graveyard I have just spent a section explaining is usually empty.

The last six are the taplands covered above. That is 15, and the list totals 100 either way.

Three five-drops and three Equipment that stay

Cutting nine cards at four mana and up, then keeping three five-drops, deserves an explanation.

Synth Infiltrator and Bottle-Cap Blast both have improvise, and improvise in a deck with 34 artifacts is not a rider, it is the real cost. Tapping four artifacts you were not using turns a five-drop into a one-drop, and those artifacts untap normally next turn. Sentinel Sarah Lyons has haste and gives the team +2/+2 for any turn an artifact entered, which in this deck is most turns.

The three Equipment are the interesting keep. Plasma Caster looks like a coin-flip card and it is, but its second line hands you two energy every time the equipped creature attacks, which in a deck this hungry for counters is the part that matters. Lightning Greaves and Illusionist's Bracers both attach to one creature in a deck that has 27, and both are here for the same reason: this commander does nothing until she can tap.

They also do not want to be on her at the same time. Greaves grants shroud, and Bracers equips by targeting, so you cannot move the Bracers onto a creature already wearing the Greaves. Equip the Bracers first, then the Greaves. If she is already hasty from the Elixir or from a previous turn, skip the Greaves entirely and leave them for something else.

The upgraded decklist

The full 100 after the swaps. Hover any card name to see the card.

Load into the deck builder Copy decklist

“Load into the deck builder” opens this list in your account, pinned to the printings the box shipped, ready to edit or save. “Copy decklist” gives you plain text for Moxfield, Archidekt or Arena — no account needed.

FAQ

What happens to my energy if Dr. Madison Li dies?

Nothing. Energy counters belong to you, not to a permanent, so they sit there waiting whether she is on the battlefield or in the command zone. Twelve cards in the upgraded list can spend energy without her, and Whirler Virtuoso is the one I added for exactly this: three counters for a 1/1 flier, at instant speed, with no tap and no mana.

Does upgrading Science! change the bracket?

No. The box floors at Bracket 1 and so does the upgraded list, because neither one runs a Game Changer, a tutor chain or a two-card combo. The deck gets meaningfully faster and more consistent without touching the number it can honestly claim, which is the best kind of upgrade to make if you play with the same group every week.

How much do the fifteen new cards cost?

Fourteen of them come to $41.41 at market for default printings, as of September 2026. Chaos Warp has no market price listed on its default printing, so that figure is a floor. Thousand-Year Elixir at $14.80 and Goblin Engineer at $9.76 are more than half of it between them, and everything else on the list is under $7.

Can Dr. Madison Li return an artifact creature from the graveyard?

Yes. Her five-energy ability returns target artifact card, and an artifact creature card is an artifact card. It comes back tapped and without haste, so it will not attack that turn unless something grants it. Liberty Prime, Recharged and Behemoth of Vault 0 are the two biggest things in the box she can reach.

Why keep three lands that always enter tapped?

Because Razortide Bridge, Rustvale Bridge and Silverbluff Bridge are artifact lands. They turn on metalcraft for Dispatch and for Brotherhood Scribe, and they count themselves toward Robobrain War Mind. The other six lands that always enter tapped give back a scry or a cycle and nothing the rest of the deck reads, so those are the ones I cut.

Is Science! the best of the four Fallout precons?

It has the cheapest singles of the four. As of September 2026 the box comes to about $91 at TCGplayer market, against $168 for Mutant Menace, $138 for Scrappy Survivors and $106 for Hail, Caesar. It also has the most upside per dollar spent, because the commander is doing something none of the other three do and the box gave her almost nothing to do it with.