Some watches impress you with a spec sheet. Others make you stop and actually count something, because you genuinely cannot believe the number is real. Roger Dubuis’ new Excalibur The Metamorph Merlin is squarely the second kind, a watch where the closer you look, the more the maths starts to feel almost unreasonable.
Twelve tiny pink gold knights stand guard around the dial, each one just six millimetres tall, and each one takes roughly three days of hand-finishing by a specialist engraver to complete. Do that arithmetic and you’re looking at well over a month of skilled human hours spent on figures smaller than a fingernail, before the watch even gets to its dial or movement.
This detail raises a question: why go to that much trouble for something people will only ever glimpse in passing? That obsessive, borderline excessive craft applied to details will never be fully appreciated at a glance, but it’s exactly the point Roger Dubuis seems determined to make.
The payoff becomes clear once you understand what this watch is actually finishing. It’s the third and final chapter of the Maison’s Knights of the Round Table trilogy dedicated to Merlin, following 2024’s Omniscient Merlin and 2025’s Enchanter Merlin. This closing piece pays tribute to Merlin’s shapeshifting powers, and for the first time in the whole collection, the story doesn’t stay confined to the dial. The pink gold case itself is entirely hand-engraved, depicting Merlin as the mythical white stag on one side and as the wise, book-holding sorcerer on the other, turning the case middle into as much of a canvas as the dial itself.
The dial deserves its own moment too. 57 individually crafted blocks in green CVD-coated glass, polished pink gold, and shimmering Crystalium, each set at a different height to build a genuinely three-dimensional forest landscape rather than a flat illustration of one. Underneath it all sits the in-house Calibre RD821, comprising 172 components and finished across fourteen distinct techniques to meet the demanding Poinçon de Genève certification. Its quiet mechanical rigour tends to go unnoticed until you know exactly what you’re looking at.
Limited to just 28 pieces worldwide, Excalibur The Metamorph Merlin isn’t for everyone. For readers who’ve spent a career being told to work faster, cut corners, and hit the deadline regardless of how it looks up close, it is a quietly satisfying piece built entirely around the opposite instinct: take the time it actually takes, and let the extreme care show.
