EVORETRO's general upgrade guide already covers the categories worth adding to any Foundations Commander deck: mana rocks, removal, and card draw.
This guide answers a narrower, more practical question instead: with a fixed $50 to spend, which of the five decks actually improves the most?
The answer isn't the same across all five, since some strategies scale hard with just a few targeted additions while others are already close to their ceiling right out of the box.
Here's how the five decks rank by upgrade return on investment, from the biggest jump to the smallest.
Improvement here means the gap between how the deck plays stock versus how it plays after $50 worth of on-theme singles, not raw card power added in a vacuum.
A deck that was already missing an obvious piece of its own strategy has more room to improve than a deck that shipped with its core game plan essentially complete.
Keen Engineering's artifact synergy plan scales unusually well with density, since more artifacts on the battlefield directly means more triggers and more value from Sai, Master Thopterist specifically.
A $50 budget spent on a couple of cheap, efficient artifact mana rocks and a low-cost card-draw artifact meaningfully raises both this deck's consistency and its ceiling, making it the single best return on a modest budget among all five decks.
Wretched Ranks already has a real recursion engine, but its stock reanimation and token generation pieces are relatively modest compared to what a small budget can add.
A couple of efficient reanimation effects or a cheap anthem for the Zombies token plan noticeably speeds up how quickly the deck rebuilds a board after a wipe, without needing a large investment to get there.
Both decks already ship with a coherent, functional game plan, so a $50 budget adds real value without transforming either deck the way it does for Keen Engineering or Wretched Ranks.
Reign of Dragons benefits most from a cheap extra ramp piece or two to reach its Dragons faster, while Calling All Angels gets the most mileage from a low-cost removal spell or an evasive Angel that fits the tribal theme.
Tramplesaurus Rex's stock ramp package is unusually strong for a $29.99 precon, which means the deck's core plan already works close to as well as a modest budget upgrade could push it.
The biggest swings for this specific deck, like premium dual lands or top-end mana rocks, generally cost well beyond $50, which makes this deck the hardest to meaningfully improve without a larger investment.
Realistically, $50 covers two to four efficient singles depending on the specific cards chosen, which is enough to smooth out a deck's rough edges but not enough to fundamentally change its identity.
Prioritizing consistency pieces, mana rocks and cheap card draw, over flashy top-end threats tends to produce the most noticeable improvement across every deck on this list.
Putting the full tier list together in order: Keen Engineering leads at S-Tier, Wretched Ranks follows at A-Tier, Reign of Dragons and Calling All Angels sit together at B-Tier, and Tramplesaurus Rex closes out the list at C-Tier.
That order tracks closely with how much of each deck's strategy was still unfinished at the $29.99 price point, rather than any difference in how good a deck feels to play stock.
Once a first upgrade pass settles in, a second round is usually better spent addressing whatever weakness actually showed up across real games rather than following a generic template.
Tracking which games were lost to a specific gap, whether that's removal, ramp, or card advantage, makes a second $50 budget far more effective than the first blind pass often is. Set aside cut cards from each pass in an EVORETRO Magnetic Card Deck Storage Box instead of losing track of them, since a swap that didn't work this season might fit a future upgrade pass.
Keen Engineering, since its artifact synergy plan scales hard with just a few added pieces.
Tramplesaurus Rex, since its stock ramp package is already close to its ceiling.
Consistency pieces like mana rocks and cheap card draw over flashy top-end threats.
No, it smooths out rough edges without fundamentally changing what the deck does.
Whichever deck you're upgrading, keep the new pieces organized alongside the original 100 cards. A EVORETRO Plastic Deck Box comfortably holds a full deck plus a handful of fresh additions.
!
