Roger Dubuis closes its Merlin trilogy with the Excalibur Metamorph Merlin, a 28-piece pink gold showpiece with a sculpted forest dial and a hand-engraved case.
Most watch collections evolve by increments: a new dial colour here, a slimmer case there. Roger Dubuis has spent more than a decade doing something stranger, telling the Arthurian legend one limited edition at a time. Its Knights of the Round Table series, part of its broader storytelling collections, has moved through several trilogies, each built around a different corner of Camelot, and the latest is devoted to the wizard Merlin. The watchmaker’s mythological homage now reaches its final chapter with the Excalibur Metamorph Merlin, a 28-piece edition in pink gold.
The trilogy opened in 2024 with the Omniscient Merlin, which dealt with the wizard’s all-seeing wisdom, and continued in 2025 with the Enchanter Merlin and his mystical powers. The closing instalment turns to the most cinematic of his talents: shapeshifting. Roger Dubuis anchors the idea in the white stag, a creature that in Arthurian myth signals transformation and the thin line between the seen and unseen worlds.
The dial is where that idea takes shape, and it does so without a single literal tree. Instead, Roger Dubuis builds the enchanted forest (the one where Merlin changed form and the Lady of the Lake is said to live) out of pure geometry. The hexagonal motif introduced in the trilogy’s first chapter, itself borrowed from the basalt columns of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, returns as 57 separate blocks, each set at its own height.
They come in four materials: green CVD-coated elements, polished pink gold, transparent glass and shimmering Crystalium. The result is less a picture of a forest than the feeling of standing in one, with depth and reflections shifting every time the wrist turns.
Then the story spills off the dial. For the first time in the Knights of the Round Table line, the case itself becomes part of the narrative, hand-engraved in micro-relief around the case middle. Merlin appears twice: once as the white stag, once in human form holding a book, a nod back to the Omniscient chapter.
Around the dial stand the 12 pink gold knights that define the collection, each just 6 mm tall and each taking a specialist engraver around three days to sculpt, engrave and finish with black patina, so that every figure has its own posture. Smaller touches complete the scene, including sword-guard shapes flanking the crown in reference to Excalibur, and a green crown that ties back to the forest.
All of this runs on the automatic Calibre RD821, developed, manufactured and hand-finished in-house, and engineered specifically to make room for the dial’s layered architecture without upsetting the proportions of the 45mm Excalibur case. Its 172 components are finished to Poinçon de Genève standards, which demand fourteen distinct decorative techniques. Turn the watch over and a skeletonised 360-degree rotor, patterned after the stained-glass windows of medieval castles, carries the theme onto the back.
This isn’t a watch for anyone who likes their horology quiet. But Roger Dubuis has never pretended otherwise, and as a closing chapter, the Metamorph Merlin makes a persuasive case that a watch can carry an entire myth on the wrist. Twenty-eight people will get to test that theory.
