From my limited experience with scents this is what I can tell you specifically the area I hunt.
- Doe in heat works ok, but only when the seeking/chasing phase is on full steam. Bucks come across it, smell it for a bit and continue on many times. Tinks 69 worked well.
- Synthetic "Buck Scent" (Code Blue) worked well for getting a buck to hit a scrape over anything else I tried.
- Curiosity lures rarely worked. At most they would stop to sniff on their way by but I saw less deer (make sure it matches your area)
- Early season I tried a young WT buck natural urine drag and when any other deer came across this trail they bolted the other way.
- I like Synthetic better than natural since I found it goes rank on you pretty fast
- Experiment with different scent-killer sprays because I found some don't work at all. If my hands smell like salami and I spray them down I should definitely not be able to smell anything after since I have a inferior human sense of smell. Some sprays accomodate this and some do not.
- I tried scent-lok clothing and definitely saw more deer. I'm not sure if it was the clothing or I just got luckier. However carbon based clothing does not "elimate" human odor, but reduces it to be (hopefully) within a level that a deer will tolerate.
I have heard that cutting tarsal glands out of bucks and freezing them for the next year then using them as a drag works really well.
So in conclusion I don't like to use any scents because I feel the chances of screwing it up are high. Even cover scents worry me as a deer may associate your cover scent with hunting as it is usually an unaturally high concentration of something (skunk, pine, earth, etc). As well I have read that deer can decipher multiple scents simultaneously so they would smell cover scent and human scent equally at the same time. That's not to say it doesn't work at all, but it does raise some questions lol.
