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Thrun, Breaker of Silence Art

Will Thrun, Breaker of Silence Bring Green Back Into Standard?

Everyone's favorite Troll Shaman, Thrun, is back! Find out what DoggertQBones thinks of this new iteration of Thrun and if the card is strong enough to bring Green back into Standard's forefront!

Hello everyone!

So we’ve been able to review Lukka, Bound to Ruin, Nahiri, the Unforgiving, Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting, Nissa, Ascended Animist, and Jace, the Perfected Mind as compleated walkers, Kaya, Intangible Slayer, The Eternal Wanderer, and Koth, Fire of Resistance as our heroes, as well as Phyrexian Obliterator , White Sun’s Twilight, Sword of Forge and Frontier, Tyrranax Rex, Capricious Hellraiser, Phyrexian Arena, Solphim, Mayhem Dominus, Phyrexian Vindicator, Cacophony Scamp, Mindsplice Apparatus, Glissa Sunslayer, and Geth, Thane of Contracts, but we have even more sweet cards to preview! Today, we’re going over a Green icon that saw a lot of play both in its Standard format and eternal formats, but now has come back in a new form – Thrun, Breaker of Silence!

So we have a 3GG 5/5, nice square stats, but then an absolute mountain of text after that!

First off, Thrun can’t be countered! This means that common spells like Make Disappear will be useless in the face of this, and for Mono Blue, this will be a real menace as well.

Next we have Trample, because it’s a Green creature! Of course it has trample!

Then we have the iconic ability on Gaea's Revenge where Thrun can’t be the target of nongreen spells and abilities which will make it functionally hexproof as well.

Finally, to wrap it all up, if it’s your turn, Thrun has Indestructible!

That is truly a lot of different text on the card, all of it positive, but that doesn’t inherently answer the question – how good is Thrun, Breaker of Silence?

VERDICT

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

So I think we can definitely tell that this card is quite strong and it was clearly designed to be. Like the old Thrun, this Thrun is extremely hard to kill by conventional means. Common removal spells Go for the Throat and The Wandering Emperor have nothing on Jolly Green over here, and even if they have a Sheoldred, the Apocalypse on defense, Thrun doesn’t care since it’s Indestructible on our turn!

So what can kill this then? Once again we run into a common problem – Invoke Despair. If this is your only creature, it gets eaten up extremely nicely by Invoke Despair which is the anathema to all creatures that are tough to kill in this format. In that capacity, something like Workshop Warchief may be a better suit in this metagame as it provides a 4/4 body on death which is a pretty nice exchange overall. However, beyond Invoke Despair or other edict effects, the only other way to kill this is a board wipe like Depopulate or Farewell, and since neither are particularly popular right now, this still won’t be easy to kill.

Now that leads us to our title’s question – will Thrun be strong enough to bring Green back into Standard? I think yes, with an asterisk. Thrun is not so strong that we will see a huge uptick in Green decks just to play it. For example, I don’t imagine Mono Green Aggro suddenly seeing a return just because of Thrun’s printing. However, this does seem like a strong enough card that players will, at a minimum, consider going Green to have access to it. This is a very nasty threat that, beyond the aforementioned cards, will be extremely difficult to deal with normally. So at a minimum, this could be an excellent tool in sideboards of decks that can afford to play it. Take for example Jund and Grixis, if you drop Blue, you lose counterspells and Corpse Appraiser, but if you get Thrun, Unleash the Inferno, Tear Asunder, and other similar goodies, that can definitely be a fair trade.

Despite the mountain of text, I think Thrun is just a good card, not an amazing one, but it’s definitely good enough to see play. Furthermore, I think the incentives to start playing Green in your midrange decks are much higher in this set than they have been recently, so in conjunction with other options, we’re definitely going to see plenty of Thrun in our future.

Thank you for reading! Agree or disagree? Come join our Discord community, discuss the new spoilers, and more.

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DoggertQBones
DoggertQBones

Robert "DoggertQBones" Lee is the content manager of MTGAZone and a high ranked Arena player. He has one GP Top 8 and pioneered popular archetypes like UB 8 Shark, UB Yorion, and GW Company in Historic. Beyond Magic, his passions are writing and coaching! Join our community on
Twitch and Discord.

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