Scavenger Grounds
Scavenger Grounds lands in 6% of tracked Commander decks and, when drawn, reaches the battlefield 72% of the time. Median first activation falls on turn 5.0, making it a mid-game graveyard answer that arrives well before most combos go off.
Scavenger Grounds sits in 6% of the 20720 Commander decks tracked on Playgroup Live. It is a zero-color-identity land, meaning it slots into any 100-card deck, and it doubles as a colorless mana source plus a repeatable exile effect for every graveyard at once.
When a copy reaches a player's hand, it is cast 72% of the time before the game ends. Players who draw it tend to hold it a turn before playing it: median hand-to-cast delay is 1 turn, and 43% of drawn copies are activated the same turn they are drawn. The median first activation lands on turn 5.0, which is later than most fast mana but well within the window where graveyard decks typically come online.
Because it costs no colored mana and enters untapped, Scavenger Grounds is a low-friction include for any archetype that wants a land-slot answer to reanimator, dredge, or recursion strategies. The data show it spread across a wide commander pool. The top commander pairing in the dataset accounts for 985 unique players overall, and the single heaviest individual contributor represents 25% of tracked instances, a sign the data is not dominated by one player's games.
- 6% of tracked Commander decks include Scavenger Grounds
- 72% of drawn copies reach the battlefield before the game ends
- T5.0 median turn of first activation
- 79% battlefield stickiness once played
- 985 distinct players have brought this card to a tracked game
- 25% draw rate per game, typical for a singleton land
First-cast turn
n=472The "good card" funnel
2651 brought · 985 playersOf 2651 copies brought to tracked games, 660 were drawn, 472 of those were cast, and a strong majority remained on the battlefield at game's end.
Players who cast this card win 27% of the time (n=440) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=1659).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 36% (n=170) — about the same as leaving it in the library. Those players survived long enough to draw it, so the gap above is about the card resolving, not just about surviving.
Observed gap +1.7pp; 95% confidence interval -2.6pp to +6.0pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
737 instancesMost copies end the game on the battlefield or in the graveyard after activation, with relatively few stranded in the library. That split reflects how naturally Scavenger Grounds enters play as a mana land even when its exile ability never triggers.
Commanders that played this card
in tracked games-
1
Captain America, Team Leader
123 decks
-
2
Doctor Doom, King of Latveria
123 decks
-
3
Y'shtola, Night's Blessed
121 decks
-
4
Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER
103 decks
-
5
T'Challa, the Black Panther
73 decks
- 6 Zhulodok, Void Gorger 50 decks
-
7
Dogmeat, Ever Loyal
25 decks
- 8 Ultron, Artificial Malevolence 16 decks
- 9 Molecule Man 13 decks
-
10
Giada, Font of Hope
12 decks
The commander distribution is broad. Y'shtola, Doctor Doom, and Captain America lead in raw deck count, but the list spans five different color identities, showing that colorless utility lands attract builders across every archetype.