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 14231 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 45% 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 699 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
- 78% battlefield stickiness once played
- 699 distinct players have brought this card to a tracked game
- 25% draw rate per game, typical for a singleton land
First-cast turn
n=316The "good card" funnel
1756 brought · 699 playersOf 1756 copies brought to tracked games, 436 were drawn, 316 of those were cast, and a strong majority remained on the battlefield at game's end.
Players who cast this card win 28% of the time (n=297) , vs 25% when it never left the library (n=1127).
When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 36% (n=109) — 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 +2.9pp; 95% confidence interval -2.4pp to +8.2pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.
Final zone distribution
487 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
Y'shtola, Night's Blessed
87 decks
-
2
Doctor Doom, King of Latveria
85 decks
-
3
Captain America, Team Leader
74 decks
-
4
Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER
69 decks
-
5
T'Challa, the Black Panther
57 decks
- 6 Zhulodok, Void Gorger 28 decks
-
7
Dogmeat, Ever Loyal
20 decks
- 8 Ultron, Artificial Malevolence 12 decks
- 9 Molecule Man 11 decks
-
10
Giada, Font of Hope
8 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.