Thanks to Magic’s long history, it’s extremely common for interesting and powerful cards to end up being forgotten. This is especially true for cards that, while powerful, took a lot of time or resources to get going. Back in the day, these cards simply weren’t viable; however, MTG nowadays is a different story.
Some once mediocre MTG cards, like Hunting Grounds, have been completely transformed by the passage of time. What was once a rather clunky value engine that took ages to get going is now a menace in the right deck. If you play your cards right, you can cheat tons of creatures in for just two mana with this forgotten enchantment.
Hunting Grounds MTG
Hunting Grounds is an MTG card with both an extremely high ceiling and an extremely low floor. Cheating out a creature each time your opponent casts a spell is obviously insane, but if you can’t get Threshold working, this card literally does nothing. This means that, if you’re going to play Hunting Grounds yourself, you absolutely need to be able to turn it on consistently.
This pushes Hunting Grounds towards decks with graveyard synergies before anything else. Commanders that either mill cards or care about the graveyard, like Karador, Ghost Chieftan, and Terra, Magical Adept, can easily turn Hunting Grounds on just by enabling their own game plan. Terra, in particular, is capable of milling over Hunting Grounds and returning it to your hand, providing an even higher chance of finding the enchantment. Commanders with Dredge themes, like The Necrobloom, also excel at filling their graveyard quickly.
Hunting Grounds is otherwise powerful in Polymorph-style decks that have extremely big creatures they want to cheat into play. Threshold may be harder to achieve with this strategy, but the dream of dropping a Blightsteel Colossus into play for free is worth the effort. Atla Palani, Nest Tender and Mayael, the Anima are a few Commander examples within Hunting Grounds’s color identity that can be built this way.
Unfortunately, even if you manage to turn on Threshold and have some powerful cards to cheat into play, Hunting Grounds can still perform suboptimally. If you use all of your cards to turn on this enchantment, there won’t be anything left to cheat into play.
Utilizing Powerful Draw Engines
In my personal experiences with Hunting Grounds, turning it on hasn’t been the issue. It’s instead been having a steady stream of creatures in hand for Hunting Grounds to cheat into play. After putting in a ton of work, it’s common for Hunting Grounds to cheat in one mediocre creature and fail to do anything else for the rest of the game.
To avoid this, powerful draw engines that trigger on creatures entering play can keep the flow of cards coming. The Great Henge is a popular and powerful example of exactly what Hunting Grounds needs to take over a game. Each creature Hunting Grounds cheats in will draw a card, fuelling more Hunting Grounds triggers in the future. Guardian Project is another extremely powerful draw engine that fulfills your needs and fits into any green creature-focused deck. A bunch of other archetypal draw engines, like Outcaster Trailblazer, Canoptek Spyder, Setessan Champion, and Soul of the Harvest unlock a lot of different options for you to make the most out of Hunting Grounds.
If you can enable Threshold consistently, this also means that Hunting Grounds is surprisingly powerful in Arcades, the Strategist decks. Your Commander will naturally fuel Hunting Grounds by drawing more cards when Defenders enter play, and there are a bunch of Walls, like Wall of Blossoms and Wall of Omens, that naturally draw cards when entering play themselves. Dropping the new Walls of Ba Sing Se for free off of an opponent’s spell can easily close games out of nowhere in this archetype, too.
Once you have a draw engine online, if you want to make sure you’re continually triggering Hunting Grounds to get the most out of your entry triggers, partnering it with Ancestral Statue will ensure you never miss a Hunting Grounds trigger. You can keep bouncing Ancestral Statue to your hand and drawing cards until you find better creatures to cheat in with Hunting Grounds’s ability. Statue otherwise goes infinite with a lot of different loops, allowing the card to also become a win condition at some point.
Powerful When You Can Use It
Considering the requirements needed to use Hunting Grounds, it’s not surprising that the card isn’t widely adopted. That said, this card is also extremely powerful under the right circumstances. With that in mind, Hunting Grounds only seeing play in 7,400 EDHREC decks is rather shocking. This enchantment is less than a dollar, to boot, which makes it an incredibly powerful budget option in the right deck.
As long as you can consistently turn Hunting Grounds on and have some powerful creatures to cheat into play with it, try it out. For just $1, you’d be surprised at how well this card can perform.
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