End grain works better than vertical grain boards, with respect to sticking.
If you intend to go vertical grain planks and you have a whole wall, then run 3 or 4 cross boards all the way across the wall and then put up X number of planks edge to edge from one side to the other.
Negatives of this method - unless you intend to make the wall moveable so that you can access it from the rear, the planks will only be attachable via screws from the front, which would make for exposed screw heads to be hit with your knives/hawks/hatchets.
If you intend to put in an end grain target wall, you could go whole hog and make the whole wall a target - fixed boards on each side and a pair in the middle, stacked cross cut sections of 2x4, 4x4, 6x6, etc sections compressed from top to bottom with very long all-thread rod on each end and a couple of runs in the middle.
The negatives here is ensuring that you get proper compress all around and it will take a whole bunch of cross cut pieces - example - every 2 ft x 2 ft area segment would require about 114 pieces of 2 x 4s or about 58 4 x 4 pieces. It's also a bitch to change out chewed blocks.
A smaller end grain version would be to build a couple of 3 ft x 3 ft or 4 ft x 4 ft IKTHOF-like end grain targets and mount them on the wall, with plywood as a back, a couple of support boards screwed in through the plywood into wall studs for a shelf for the the targets to sit on, and then mount a couple of boards across the tops of the targets, screwed into the wall studs. Then drive a couple of screws vertically up and down through the cross boards above and below the targets.
Or do something similar with 3 24" x 24" IKTHOF end grain targets mounted in the IKTHOF V pattern. Advantage, much lighter weight than a 3 ft or 4 ft target.
Negatives - still a lot blocks involved, but a lot fewer than a whole wall's worth.