Petting Zookeeper
Creature — Elf Employee
Reach
When this creature enters, open an Attraction. (Put the top card of your Attraction deck onto the battlefield.)
- CMC
- 3
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- G
- Rarity
- common
- Set
- Unfinity
- Price
- —
- EDHREC rank
- #16123
Petting Zookeeper puts a free Hunt counter on any creature the moment it enters — that's immediate, no-tap-required board interaction that scales with whatever token or creature strategy you're running. The cost is real: it's a silver-bordered card legal only in Commander by house rule, and its four restrictions mean you're building around it deliberately, not slotting it in casually; The Most Dangerous Gamer is the deck that actually wants it.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | banned |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | banned |
| pauper | banned |
| oathbreaker | banned |
Petting Zookeeper is banned in Legacy, Vintage, Pauper, and Oathbreaker, and isn't legal in Modern, Pioneer, or Standard — Commander is the only sanctioned format where it sees play, and even there it carries four restrictions that gate its use. Those restrictions exist precisely because a free, repeatable counter-distribution effect is the kind of thing that breaks games in lower-card-count formats where one card does too much work. Commander's 100-card singleton structure, higher starting life total, and multiplayer dynamics dilute that power enough that the card earns a legal status, but you're still building deliberately around Petting Zookeeper rather than treating it as a generic staple.
Best Commanders
Commanders with the highest synergy
The Most Dangerous Gamer
The Most Dangerous Gamer turns Hunt counters into a resource engine, and Petting Zookeeper distributes those counters for free on every creature that enters — 85% of The Most Dangerous Gamer decks run it because it's one of the most efficient ways to keep the commander's ability firing without spending additional mana.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
unknown tier
Pricing data for Petting Zookeeper isn't currently available through standard sources, likely because its silver-bordered status puts it outside the main Scryfall and TCGPlayer price indexes. If you're hunting a copy, expect to check secondary market listings or trades directly — demand is real given its near-universal inclusion in The Most Dangerous Gamer builds, so don't assume it's cheap just because pricing is hard to pin down.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.