Roger Dubuis Excalibur Metamorph Merlin: 28-Piece Finale

Roger Dubuis closes its Merlin trilogy with the Excalibur Metamorph Merlin: 28 pieces, hand-engraved pink gold case, Calibre RD821, 57-block green dial.

The Reveal

• Limited to 28 pieces, the Excalibur Metamorph Merlin houses the automatic Calibre RD821 within a hand-engraved 45mm pink gold case, closing Roger Dubuis’s three-part Merlin chapter of the Knights of the Round Table saga.
• The 57-block dial combines four distinct materials — CVD-coated glass, polished pink gold, transparent glass and Crystalium — arranged at varying heights to produce a layered, three-dimensional green landscape.
• For the first time in the collection, the case itself is fully hand-engraved, depicting Merlin as both the white stag and the wise figure holding a book.
• Calibre RD821 carries the Poinçon de Genève certification, requiring fourteen decorative techniques applied across all 172 components.

The Story Behind It

Roger Dubuis began its fourth Knights of the Round Table book with Merlin as protagonist — first the Omniscient Merlin in 2024, then the Enchanter Merlin in 2025, and now the Metamorph Merlin as the concluding chapter. The symbolic anchor is Merlin’s power of transformation, embodied here by the mythical white stag: a figure from Arthurian lore that passes between the visible and invisible worlds. By building across three successive releases, Roger Dubuis has treated the Excalibur case not as an annual product cycle but as a sustained narrative, each edition adding a layer of meaning to the one before. The white stag, chosen for this finale, carries particular weight: it arrives after the all-seeing sorcerer and the enchanter, as the form that dissolves the boundary between them.

Design & Mechanics

The hexagonal dial geometry traces directly to the collection’s first chapter, where the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway provided the structural vocabulary. Here, that language deepens into a forest rather than a coastline: 57 blocks at staggered heights, green CVD coating across shotblasted glass, polished pink gold, transparent glass and Crystalium inlays. Across the perimeter, twelve pink gold knights stand approximately six millimetres tall, each requiring around three days of hand-finishing — sculpting, engraving, black patina — to give every figure its own posture. Flanking the crown, sword-shaped guards reference Excalibur, while the crown’s green colour picks up the forest palette. The case sides are fully hand-engraved, the first time in the collection, and the open case back reveals a skeletonised oscillating weight modelled on medieval stained-glass windows, a detail visible to collectors in the Gulf who tend to appreciate the reverse as closely as the dial.

Calibre RD821 is engineered specifically to sit beneath this three-dimensional dial without compromising the Excalibur case’s proportions. At 3.5mm thick and 11½ lignes in diameter, it runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour with 48 hours of power reserve. The Poinçon de Genève — referenced by organisations such as the Fondation Haute Horlogerie as among the most demanding certifications in Geneva watchmaking — requires all fourteen decorative techniques across every surface of every component. Roger Dubuis states that this work is carried out entirely in-house at its Meyrin manufacture.

Market Position

Twenty-eight pieces places the Metamorph Merlin among the most restricted Roger Dubuis editions in the Knights of the Round Table lineage — a scale that makes allocation, rather than retail availability, the operative reality. For collectors across the Gulf following the brand through Watches and Wonders and beyond, the closure of the Merlin trilogy gives this final chapter a finality the earlier two did not carry. Acquisition should be discussed directly with Roger Dubuis or an authorised retailer, as no specific distribution channels are named in the official press materials.

Specifications

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