With fancy new cards catering to various formats, corrections through pre-banning, and no glaring outliers in terms of strength, Wizards of The Coast seems to have learned from the previous iteration's warping effect
You can copy spells that target your creatures, which essentially doubles your individual protection and pump spells
The difference with silver-bordered cards is that gold-bordered cards are reprints of cards that are, or were at the time, legal for Constructed play
Percentage usage according to MTGTop8 would suggest that Ragavan should be higher on this list, but Orcish Bowmasters is still prevalent in the two most popular decks in the format, which puts Ragavan on shaky ground
Hence, you generate value, even when sacrificing creatures to Thran