My take:
Hunting GroundsThis is a card with a lot of little things going on. The most important thing about it, by far, though, is that the top of that text box lets you draw four cards (without penalty). This is the most powerful, relevant, overall the most significant ability of the card by far. Let’s break it down.
Level One: Big MoneyOne of the earliest strategies people often learn is Big Money/Draw: you get a very small number of a terminal draw card, lots of the most efficient treasure you can, provinces when you’re able. This strategy is, in general, not very flexible or resilient, which makes it not great. Hunting Grounds is actually even worse than normal though. Why? Well, there are a few reasons. The fourth card doesn’t do a ton here, since the turns you are drawing three are usually quite good anyway – similar to how Courtyard is better than Smithy in this kind of strategy. And drawing four means you can’t play as many Hunting Grounds as you would with other terminals. Finally, it costs 6, which not only makes you slower to get to it, but also means it’s competing with gold. Sure, the first Hunting Grounds is definitely better than the first Gold, so if you do end up in this strategy, take it. But the reason this is really a problem is that you are losing out on some of the upside of hitting 6 and effectively wasting your 4- and 5-coin hands, which is pretty bad in a big money strategy. Long story short, this is a better strategy than straight-up big money, but there will almost always be another action card on the board which is better for this than big money – and Hunting Grounds itself will tend to push you more towards engines. Which brings us to…
Level Two: EnginesEngines are generally pretty strong anyway, but Hunting Grounds accentuates this. The biggest reason is the sheer drawing power. In order to get your deck drawn, you simply need raw drawing power – the number of cards your deck can draw needs to be at least the number of actual cards in your deck (minus your starting hand-size). The typical rate on draw cards is that you get three and a bonus for a cost of 5 coins – Rabble, Catacombs, Journeyman, Margrave, Smithy (bonus is costing 4), etc etc. I want to stress , first and foremost, that Hunting Grounds is not all that different from those cards. If you play like you would for those, you won’t be that far off.
There are a few wrinkles though. Compared to those cards, this draws one more. In some sense, this is 4/3 as much raw power – however, practically speaking, it’s usually going to be more than that, since it takes a card slot in your deck itself (there’s also some consideration to the number of villages you’ll need being lessened with this, which can really be relevant if you’re pinched for +actions). What can you do with more drawing power per draw card? Well, in some sense, there are two main options: You can either do the same amount with less of these, or you can get the same amount of these, and do more.
Let’s take these options in order. Having less of these would generally be beneficial because it would theoretically be faster to set up than the other draw cards. There are two problems with this: first, Hunting Grounds costs 6, which is going to make it a little bit tough to be much faster than the cheaper cards. Second, this Hunting Grounds-based deck is going to be a lot less reliable than the others. Not only are you missing out on the bonus those other cards give you beyond simply drawing 3 (a bonus which most often is going to help you be consistently drawing your draw cards, at least to some extent, which is what you need to do to draw your deck), but having fewer overall drawing cards makes it much more likely that you’re going to be missing out on one of those key components and have a ‘dud’ hand where your engine ‘misfires’ and you can’t draw your deck for a turn. So while sometimes you do want to go with les and be faster, you are more often going to want to just do more. What ‘doing more’ entails is going to vary wildly from kingdom to kingdom, but essentially it lets you have a more powerful and explosive late game, because you can load up on more payload. I will note that this doesn’t really solve the reliability issue. For that, you will probably need to build to overdraw, a bit more here than you would with most of your other draw cards. And in general, if there is other draw available in the kingdom, you are going to be mixing and matching, some Hunting Grounds for their raw power, some of the other draw for reliability and cheapness. And of course, you are going to want to build the engine essentially as normal, focusing on thinning and getting your draw up first and foremost. One of Hunting Grounds real strengths is to be added as the extra draw to an already-functioning engine, which simply needs more draw cards to keep up with any green or non-drawing payload.
Level Three: Tricks and NuancesHonestly, the above really is the vast majority of what you want to do with the card. If you focus too much on fancy gimmicks and subtleties – like what I’m going to talk about below – while neglecting the basic bread-and-butter of draw-four, you’re doing yourself a disservice (if your goal is winning, anyway). Having said that, let’s dive in for an extra few percent, which can really make the difference at high levels.
Having some way to mitigate the potential reliability problems I discuss above is nice. Scheme can do this. Perhaps more straightforwardly, sifting cards like Cellar, Warehouse, and Inn can help to find your Hunting Grounds, and the Hunting Grounds’ sheer power can overcome the card which those cards leave you down. Alternatively, you can look to use flexible cards which can either draw for you if you need to find Hunting Grounds or be payload after you have drawn your deck. Those let you continue to build with somewhat less risk than having only a few draw cards while still having more oomph than you would get from buying lots of over-draw.
There’s this on-trash clause I haven’t mentioned yet. It doesn’t come up a lot. When it does, it’s almost always being used for trash-for-benefit, and it’s almost always being used at the end of the game. Turning a draw four into quite-bad-for-engines-green-cards is just not a deal you want to make earlier. Given that, it often won’t matter whether you get duchy or estates; when it does, it’s usually because you are emptying a pile. The on-trash “benefit” synergizes a bit with solving the consistency problem noted above – simply get some extra Hunting Grounds, perhaps without even the actions to play them all. You won’t need the last one or two, but they still give your engine reliability. And then at the end, you can cash them in for points. Certainly in engines with trashing, this is better than just buying duchy (except on the turn you’re ending the game), if you can spare the extra $1 and this doesn’t kill you on piles. Occasionally, you’ll get a very thin deck with trash-for-benefit cards where you’re a bit desperate for more fuel – Hunting Grounds can be your friend there. You can potentially try to use the trash ability as a source of points, perhaps with alternate VP, but in general, this isn’t a very good idea, because the decks that want this aren’t usually the same decks that want a draw 4. The on-trash can also be a drawback, if you for some reason need to trash this before the end of the game – Swindler maybe. Almost none of this stuff comes up much, though.
