Hunting Grounds – Dominaria Remastered
Date Reviewed: January 16, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.13
Casual: 5.00
Limited: 2.25
Multiplayer: 4.37
Commander [EDH]: 4.50
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Speaking of happier or unhappier times, Hunting Grounds is a card I haven’t seen discussed in a long time. It’s another one that I seem to recall was once part of Wizards of the Coast’s “From the Lab” column, the one that brewed casual decks with unusual cards. This is about as unusual as it gets, but it’s important to keep in mind that it came from the Odyssey block, where there were a myriad of ways to put things in your graveyard. There were also not very many things you wanted to cheat in, at least none that were as devastating as the kinds of things you think of nowadays. Still, a free Silvos or even Mystic Enforcer could destroy the right opponent, if you could make it work. Opponents won’t play into it if they really don’t have to, and there’s probably a limit to the amount you can bluff with it (and doing so wouldn’t even win you the game!). But it’s definitely worth revisiting in casual play – not only as a reminder of a different time, but also to throw Eldrazi at people in decks that they might not associate with the practice.
Constructed: 3
Casual: 5
Limited: 2
Multiplayer: 4.5
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
Dominaria Remastered brought with it a wealth of cards from the game’s history, and Hunting Grounds from Judgment is one that has long been a tantalizing weapon. The effect is undeniably brutal: penalize any spell cast by bringing a friend in from your hand. So long as you can keep a full hand and a full graveyard, this gets very fraught, because your opponents can’t readily remove the permanent without penalty.
Unfortunately, Hunting Grounds has never quite panned out despite its promise, and a large part of that is the need to trigger threshold. This is not a herculean task in deeper formats, but it still takes effort, and green and white are among the weaker colors at filling up their graveyards in a timely manner. Despite costing two mana, Hunting Grounds is rarely online on turn two, and it takes a lot of effort to get this up and running before you just get run over in Legacy.
I will say that Hunting Grounds will likely forever be a card on the cusp of being broken; a spell that says “cast nothing, lest you incur The Tentacling” will always draw attention, and this certainly plays well in formats where you have the time to set up and the means to get going. But this just has never been fast enough for Constructed, with the caveat that there may be a day where it’s fast enough to wreak havoc.
Constructed: 3.25 (a strange card that has never panned out, but might one day)
Casual: 5
Limited: 2.5 (setting up Hunting Grounds in Limited is quite an ordeal, and having friends worth tricking in is even more of an ask)
Multiplayer: 4.25
Commander [EDH]: 4.5
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