@jardinain2: Yea and i want to make a post tonight. Im booooored lmao. Once change tho. Can i say in the OP that the battlefield is a generic neutral mana plane thats uninhabited?
@banthabot: I kinda just assumed that from a debating perspective anyway, but by all means. Take any pretty vista you want, I wanted Bolas to have his full power without leylines.
Nicol Bolas, the Forever Serpent, the Horned One, the God-Pharaoh, and Lord Nicolas, is the big bad guy of the Magic the Gathering multiverse. He is an elder dragon that is over 25,000 years old and potentially one of the oldest being in the multiverse. Nicol Bolas is an elder dragon planeswalker who was born before the mending. As the mending took place the very fundamentals of the planeswalker spark changed and Nicol Bolas lost massive amounts of his former power. After the mending he began hatching schemes in order to regain his former power. His plans span multiple planes of existence and often straddle decades or centuries. Although most people cannot understand his plans, or the destruction he reaps, there is a purpose behind his cruelty. No one can outsmart his intellect and no being can match his power. One way or another Nicol Bolas will have his way.
Before we get into things I want to get this out of the way because it is important to a good amount of feats that I will be presenting throughout this debate. Many of the feats presented will not be accomplished by Nicol Bolas himself, but a fake Nicol Bolas he created to act in his stead throughout the planes. These Bolas's are meant to be exactly like the real one except less powerful and less intelligent.
Here is the passage where it is revealed. I underlined some important parts.
All of the fake Bolas's senses physical and magical tell him that the real Bolas is powerful he shouldn't exist
The real Bolas mocks the fake Bolas and states that he isn't even a tenth as smart as he is
The fake Bolas thinks the real Bolas is unimaginably powerful.
Nicol Bolas settled himself onto the etherium sand. At last he could begin to excise the artificer’s annoying little gimmicks and get himself out of here. “Damn, I thought he’d never leave.”
“You and me both, brother.”
Bolas lurched upright. The voice had been impossibly deep, impossibly dark, and most of all, impossibly close. Behind him was a rip in the fabric of the universe, held open by some impressively sizable talons. Bolas gathered himself into a crouch—talons like those usually belonged to dragons, and from their dimensions, it wasn’t impossible that this new planeswalking dragon, whoever it was, might be even larger than Bolas himself. “Take it easy, pal,” the new dragon said. “I’m not here to fight.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not,” Bolas growled, “because you have no idea who you’re about to—”
“It’s more the other way around,” the new dragon said as he shouldered his way into the world. He stopped, stretched, and gaped his great fanged mouth wide in a jaw-cracking yawn.
Nicol Bolas stared in uncomprehending astonishment. “You—you look just like me!”
“That’s more the other way around, too.” The dragon grinned down at him, and Bolas realized that despite the resemblance, this dragon was vastly larger than he was, and younger, and possessed of a staggering magnitude of power that Bolas could only faintly glimpse. All his senses, magical as well as physical, told him that this dragon was so powerful he shouldn’t be able to even exist.…
Nothing in his twenty-five thousand years of life had prepared him to face a being like this.
“You—are you—who—I mean, what? What’s going on? It’s as if you’re me.”
“I am you,” the new dragon said with a vast and gleaming fang-filled grin. “You’re the one who’s not you.”
“What?”
“Nice job with Tezzeret, by the way. You learn a lot about someone by how he treats you when he’s got nothing to fear. And now we’ve got him working for us willingly. Enthusiastically. Hells, he thinks he’s doing us a favor.”
Bolas still couldn’t quite get his mind around what was happening, though a terrible dread had begun to curdle in his gut. “Us? What do you mean, us?”
“Oh, well, there’s that, I suppose.” The dragon waved a talon in languid dismissal. “By us, you should understand that I mean me. There is no you. Not really.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know, you’re having a hard time with this,” the other dragon said sympathetically. “There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that constructs like you have a pretty limited useful life span. You start to break down only a day or two after you’re created. You must have noticed how it’s gotten harder and harder to think.”
“Constructs? Like me?” Bolas shook his head wildly, as though he could jerk himself awake from this terrible nightmare. “You’re saying I’m … that I’ve always been …”
“Don’t take it too hard,” the other dragon said. “It’s a fail-safe, really. Otherwise, every time I put one like you together, I’d have to chase you down and kill you myself, just to keep you from screwing around in my business.”
“Your business? I still don’t understand.…”
“Of course you don’t. In addition to that construct thing I told you about, I also had to make you pretty stupid.”
“What?”
“If you were a tenth as smart as I am, you would have been ten times too smart to fall into Tezzeret’s trap. As it is, you’ll be dead a few hours from now, and your corpse will evaporate. If I want Tezzeret to find a Nicol Bolas here when he gets back, I’ll have to make another of you. Maybe even several more.”
“You’re saying—you’re saying that you—?”
“Damn, you really are stupid,” the larger dragon said. “Well, I guess Tezzeret can’t be wrong about everything, can he?”
The vast, unimaginably powerful dragon looked down upon the pale, dying simulacrum he had created, and sighed.
“Yes, idiot. I am the real Nicol Bolas,” he said. “And I did not reach my exceedingly advanced age by being stupid enough to do my dirty work in person.”
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
The take away from this is that the real Nicol Bolas is more powerful than the fake ones comprehension and over ten times more intelligent. So when ever a feat with the Fake Bolas shows up it needs to be upscaled by an absurd amount to match what the real Bolas can do.
With that out of the way lets get into it.
Strength and Endurance
Nicol Bolas is incredibly strong and durable. I don't know what Magik's endurance is like but his physical might should be a threat to her.
Leading up to Bolas's fight with Ugin the two dragons circling each other was enough to cause a hurricane.
Bolas spoke something to Ugin, barbed words in low tones that Sarkhan couldn't hear over the wind. Ugin spoke back, calm and serious, with a note of warning, and Bolas's smile spread like a stain. The dragons spiraled around each other, great lungs and great wings churning air, eyes darting from weak spot to weak spot. The storm clouds encircled them, two titans at the eye of a hurricane.
-Magic the Gathering: The Chain Reforged
Here is a visual representation of their battle.
-Magic the Gathering: Crux of Fate
And since I went out of my way to set up the Fake Bolas, here is my first Fake Bolas feat that needs to be massively upscaled to match the real Bolas.
Fake Bolas can throw a lump of metal weighing one ton several hundred miles.
Then he jammed Tezzeret’s body fully into the now-viscous metal, let the metal reharden around him, and then simply hurled it with all the strength he could muster—physical and magical—out over the infinite ocean. He didn’t even bother to mark where it would hit the water, some hundreds of miles from the island, but turned instead to the other three deanimated Planeswalkers.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
If we lowball and say Bolas is only ten times stronger than the fake Bolas. That would see Bolas throwing one ton several thousand miles. Based on this lowball he could throw one ton approximately half way around the earth.
Now lets talk endurance. It takes alot to hurt Bolas. Lets throw another Fake Bolas feat at you. Fake Bolas lets the pyromancer planeswalker Baltrice blast him with all her power point blank in the eye ball, and he doesn't even blink.
She snarled a string of obscenities while she summoned a flare of power around her right hand that would have done credit to a medium-sized star. Cords bulging in her neck, she ripped her arm free of his casual grip and aimed it at Bolas’s face.
“Really?” he said. “Well, since you’ve one to all this trouble …” He leaned down until the corner of his mouth was only a few feet from her outstretched hand, and he winked at her. “All right. How’s this?”
“You tell me,” she said, and a blast of incandescent flame roared from her fingertips and caught the dragon squarely in his right eye. The raging fire ripped across the dragon’s cornea. It almost made him blink. Almost.
“Oh, you are adorable,” he said with an indulgent chuckle. “Hush now. Settle down before I smoke you like a cigar.”
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
Baltrice is capable of calling a fireball from the sky so powerful that it instantly evaporate multiple houses, creates an artificial dawn, appears like a second moon, and the fire blots out the stars. From this fireball rises a massive elemental of fire that is taller than some trees.
The sky above the swamp brightened. Almost unnoticeable at first, through the umbrella of heavy branches and dangling moss, the strange light swiftly grew. A second moon appeared in the heavens, red and crackling and angry; and then it was no moon at all, but an artificial dawn.
Even as the nezumi peered upward from their posts, or emerged blinking from their huts, the ball of fire plummeted from the sky and burst on the village outskirts. Entire houses evaporated at a stroke, and the flames fanned outward, carried over the stagnant waters on the back of burning winds. Cypress, bamboo, and nezumi pelts ignited in a terrible conflagration—but the trees and the stalks didn’t scream. Smoke rose between the surviving branches, blotting out the stars and spreading the choking, sickening scent of cooked flesh.
Jace screamed at Baltrice to stop, but his voice was lost in the crackling of the fire and the shrieks of dying nezumi. The smoke burned his eyes, and despite the blazing heat, he found himself shivering with a sudden horror.
One murder. One. That he could live with. To that, he had long ago resigned himself. But this …
Unseen behind Baltrice, who exulted in the release of her most devastating spells, Jace raised his hands as though to wrap them physically around Baltrice’s essence. He held her mind in those fists, and for an instant, Jace knew he could kill.
Still she was casting. Even as the carnage from the fireball spread, her muscles tensed once more, her lips parted with something like a screaming grunt. His skin tingled, and he recognized the feel of something forcing its way into the world from outside.
It erupted from the swamp at the heart of the fireball’s impact, a volcano of fire and fury, and the shallow water around it vanished in a hiss of steam. Humanoid only by the most generous use of the term, it towered above the bamboo stalks, above even some of the trees. It glared about it with eyes of fire, lashed about with hands of the same, for that was all it was. Fire: raw, primal, elemental.
-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice
Yet this chick, full power, point blank, to the eye ball, cant even make fake Bolas blink.
Even gods can't harm him. In fact attacks from the goddess Oketra only cause him to laugh as they bounce harmlessly off him.
Oketra raised her bow high, and the light of twin suns glinted off its curve. She loosed an arrow into the sky, and it passed through the Hekma with ease. The arrow hit the dragon's side, and he laughed.
-Magic the Gathering: Hours of Revelation
Oketra can launch arrows over the horrizon that turn undead sandwurms to ash. These same wurms were causing trouble for the Gatewatch and nearly killed Nissa and Liliana.
Note that the impact blew Gideon Jura off his feet. He is a guy who has mountain+ level strength which I will demonstrate later on in the post.
Suddenly, a dazzling light burst from the horizon.
I threw up an arm and shielded my eyes on reflex as a force knocked me flying back through the air. The next instant, my mind had to catch up with what it saw.
A massive arrow, blazing with burning white light, pierced the wurm that loomed over Liliana's unconscious form. I watched, stunned, as the wurm withered away, its body turned to ash. The arrow vanished, as though a sunbeam glancing off the reflective sands, as the remnants of the wurm blew away in the wind.
-Magic the Gathering: Impact
Here are some pictures from the story impact of the sandwurms that the Gatewatch was fighting, just so you understand how large of a creature she turned to ash.
Gallery
Magic
In my next post I will go into greater depth as to how powerful Nicol Bolas is, for now I will leave you with some lower end hype.
On the plane of Theros an entire greek style pantheon of gods lives in the sky. These gods are immortal shapeshifters with unrivaled power. Evidence of this is when Thassa was toying with Kiora, simply putting on a show for her followers.
Yet Kruphix, the god of Horizon, believes that there are three threats out in the multiverse too great for even the entire pantheon of gods to defend against. The Phyrexian Plague, the Eldrazi, and Nicol Bolas.
The merfolk Kiora, said Kruphix, came here from a world whose existence was threatened by something called the Eldrazi. They are vast and terrible, the equal of any god. And they eat worlds, My Oracle. Strip the flesh from the bones of the earth and leave a dead husk, moving on to the next.
The leonin Ajani has faced an immensely powerful foe, a fellow world-walker and a dragon. He is unfathomably ancient, even to me. He seeks infinite power and immortal life. His plots span worlds and centuries, and he will spare nothing and no one who stands in his way.
And the human Elspeth...she came here from a place called Phyrexia, an entire world of flayed skin and twisted metal, ruled over by vicious, monstrous beings who style themselves gods. It is an affront to nature, a dark parody of life that corrupts all it touches and touches everything in time. And it has already made its way from one world to others.
Kruphix looked out into Nyx, night staring into night.
If any of these things come here, to our world, he said, even the gods may be powerless to stop them. And all your prayers, all your pleas, will fall on the deaf ears of a silent sky as this world is rent asunder or remade or worse.
-Magic the Gathering: Kruphix's Insight
The gods of Theros consider Bolas a world ending threat that even they can't defend against. Is this fear justified? Yes it is. Bolas has already soloed a pantheon of gods, and was stated to be at least equal to all 8 gods combined.
The gods of Amonkhet roared and cursed, but no blow from their weapons would land. The trespasser's power was at least equal to their own.
-Magic the Gathering: The Hour of Revelation
I already demonstrated how Oketra can launch an arrow over the horizon that's shockwave blew Gideon Jura off his feet and turned a sandwurm to ash. But Hazoret has also demonstrated her power against Gideon Jura when she cracked his invulnerability with a single strike.
-Magic the Gathering: Gideon's Intervention
Gideon Jura has mountain+ level strength and his shield can withstand mountain+ level attacks without mention of them cracking.
This is demonstrated when Gideon withstood two strikes from Ulamog, and then held Ulamog from advancing for a short time. Just so you understand, Ulamog is an Eldrazi Titan that is larger than a mountain. Picture 3 really puts into perspective his size compared to mountains.
Gallery
Okay he is huge. But he can also casually turn a mountain to fine scree and rubble.
The ground began to shake more violently. The roar behind suddenly swelled to a deafening bellow and Anowon and Nissa leaped back against the rock next to the cave mouth.
And just in time. Moments later enormous tentacles snaked out of the cave mouth, followed by jagged, bony arms. The very mountain began to come down around the tentacles. What could only have been an Eldrazi titan glided out of the hole, its tentacles slathered in mucus.
Nissa began to run. The others followed. Whatever was coming out of the cave mouth was huge. The ground was fracturing under it. Nissa glanced back as she ran—the red tooth, the spire at the top of the mountain, cracked and tumbled down over the creature’s bony neck. Nissa and Anowan ran as hard as they could until the ground was not shaking as much. Nissa stopped and turned.
As Nissa watched, the creature nuzzled its bulbous bone face into fine scree and rubble which was all that was left of the mountain. In appearance the beast looked much as a brood lineage, but larger by far. As tall as a turntimber tree. And the smell! The smell made her want to die. Rotting meat and mushrooms and sulfur from the very bowels of the rock.
But there were differences, aside from its immensity. The small plants eking out an existence in the scree withered to black smudges on the stones as the titan neared. A stone pig fled its burrow in terror, but fell to sludge as it passed near the titan’s tentacles. Nissa felt the terrible power as well. She felt the force within her body pulling toward the tentacled menace, as iron to a magnet. It was hard for her to work her lungs at pulling air.
-Magic the Gathering: In the Teeth of Akoum
Here is Gideon holding Ulamog from advancing after taking two strikes from him. Gideon was being pushed back by Ulamog but he could have only been pushed back 4-5 feet because as soon as Ulamog was suddenly bound, Gideon Jura stumbled forward and nearly fell off the front of the rock he was standing on.
The only thing Gideon could see was jagged, white bone: Ulamog's thick faceplate. The titan was too close; the trap should have stopped him by now, he should have been contained. But something had gone wrong.
Gideon had been preparing himself for this moment since the first time he had heard Jace explain the plan. He had believed it would work, he had trusted the mind mage—and he still did—but he had always known that there was a possibility that something would go wrong. Jace had known it too. That's why Gideon had stationed himself here on this rock. He was the last line of defense. He stood between Sea Gate and Ulamog, and he would hold his position for as long as it took them to set the trap.
And if they couldn't set it, if it came to it, then Gideon would call for an evacuation. And he would hold the titan back until his army could get to safety. But it wasn't time for that yet. He could hold out a little longer. They just needed a little longer...
One of Ulamog's tentacles soared through the air, aimed right at Gideon. Whorls of invulnerability erupted over his skin in anticipation of the collision.
Gideon absorbed the blow, gritting his teeth under the weight of it. A second tentacle hurtled his way from the other side. He shifted the focus of his protection.
How much longer should he wait? He slashed back Ulamog's reaching fingers. Just a little longer...
The titan leaned forward, bearing down toward Gideon. Gideon dug his feet into the rock and stared straight into where he imagined the titan's eyes would be. "You're not getting past me." He turned his shoulder to meet Ulamog's chest, focusing all of his power into that single point, the point of impact. He grounded himself, clenching every muscle in his body, pushing back.
It was as though the weight of an entire world was being driven against him.
He felt his feet begin to slip. Was it time? He opened his mouth to give the order, but then closed it. He could hold out just a little longer. They needed just a little longer...
Gideon squeezed his eyes shut, exhaling a roaring cry with the effort.
He was losing ground.
Then suddenly a blue flash lit up the inside of his eyelids, and the pressure on his shoulder vanished.
Gideon stumbled forward with the momentum stored up from the force he had been exerting on the titan. He caught himself just before he tumbled off the front of the floating rock...which meant there was nothing else in front of him to stop his fall. He was no longer standing face-to-face with the titan.
Ulamog had been pulled within the bounds of the hedron prison—and the prison was glowing, glowing a brilliant blue. The gleam flooded Sea Gate, drowning out the shadow of the great Eldrazi.
-Magic the Gathering: Hedron Alignment
I think between these two showings of Oketra and Hazoret it is safe to assume that all 8 gods individually are within the mountain range level of power. And Bolas is ATLEAST equal to all 8 of them combined.
So he has alot of raw power, but what are his capabilities?
His go to power is telepathy, and his power in this regard is unmatched. He is powerful enough to absolutely decimated Agents of Artifice Jace Beleren with a single tendril of thought.
Jace felt his world spinning, overwhelmed at the intensity of Bolas’s fervor. Why … Why are you telling me this?
Why, Jace Beleren? I thought that you would care to know. That, and it made for a magnificent diversion, don’t you think?
Even as Jace froze, a lightning bolt of panic flashing through him, he felt the dragon’s mind sweep past, arrowing for gaps in the “net” of thoughts and notions with which he had surrounded Tezzeret’s mind.
His body rigid, as though he’d long since succumbed to the blizzard’s touch, Jace hurled the entire force of his will into a mental lunge. His mind screamed into the ice, and nobody heard. Like a closing fist, he snapped shut the grid of thought, trying to block Bolas before he—
Oh, dear Heaven!
Jace’s mind quailed before the greatest power he had ever felt. The innermost depths of Alhammarret’s psyche, the very core of the wizard’s being, had been nothing, a gentle springtime gust to the roaring hurricane that was this single tendril of the dragon’s mind.
That tendril became a spear, stabbing at Tezzeret’s mind. The web-work of Jace’s magic closed around it, trapping it between ideas. Bolas pushed, Jace squeezed, and for just an instant—precious little time, yet a far more impressive feat than Jace would ever realize—the young mage held fast.
Sweat poured from his brow and froze, forming a tiny hedge of his hair. His eyes watered, threatening to do the same, and Jace blinked them clear before the forming icicles could blind him. His head pounded, and the sky and the snow turned gray before his fading vision. In seconds, what little mana waited to be tapped underground was gone. He strained to reach farther out, hoping for more, and found almost none to be had. Bolas, or whatever wizards dwelt on this inhospitable world, had truly sucked the region dry.
His breathing came in short and ragged gasps, the frigid air burning his lungs. His stomach knotted, his fists clenched inside their gloves. He felt a capillary burst in his left eye, heard something pop deep in his sinuses. He felt a liquid warmth running from his nose, a warmth that didn’t last long before it, too, began to freeze.
Still the pressure grew, the mind-tendril shifting in his grasp, and Jace knew, without knowing how he knew, that the dragon had not yet begun to struggle. Maybe—maybe—if Jace had remained focused, if he’d caught the attack before it had already penetrated his scattered defenses, he might have had a chance. He could have altered the phalanx of concentration and deliberation that protected Tezzeret, closed the gaps before Bolas exploited them, and just perhaps repulsed the dragon long enough to get Tezzeret some sort of warning.
But now? Every instinct Jace had, every part of his soul, shrieked at him to retreat, to draw back into his mind and get as far away as possible. With a defeated gasp, he tumbled to the ground. His body shook, and the ice and snow around him turned pink with blood.
-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice
This version of Jace Beleren, while inferior to modern Jace, was capable of assaulting a building, casually reducing grown men to children, and wiping peoples minds to the point that they cant remember their own name.
Alas, it never occurred to Paldor that, when dealing with a potentially invisible foe, any precautions he might order were already far too late. The faeries weren’t a distraction against an incursion to come, but an incursion already committed; and the cell’s security had been breached as early as the third “false” alarm.
“Sir!”
It wasn’t the captain speaking, then, but one of his runners, breathless and panting, addressing the captain. But Paldor, growing ever paler, heard it all through the speaking tube. “Sir, I—I …”
“Calm down, soldier!” Sevrien barked. “Take a breath!”
“But—but sir, Ireena’s team … the entire team is down!”
“What do you mean ‘down’?” Paldor and the captain spoke at once, Paldor having forgotten that the runner couldn’t hear him.
“Oh, gods, sir!” Paldor could have sworn he heard the younger soldier’s voice about to break. “Three of the men, sir, I … It’s as though they were rotting for years, sir! I—I slipped in one of them, they’re all over me, they’re—”
Paldor heard the sharp retort of a slap, and Sevrien shouting for calm even as a murmur passed through the other men and women in the chamber. Tezzeret’s lieutenant found himself sweating.
“—the others?” the captain was demanding. “Or Ireena herself?”
“Just—just sitting there in the midst of it all, sir!” the soldier sobbed. “Staring up at me, like they didn’t even know who I was! Didn’t even recognize their own names when I called!”
“Good gods,” Sevrien whispered. “All right,” he said, and Paldor knew from the shift in volume that he’d turned to face another of his seconds. “Where’s Lieutenant Calran? I need him to—” “He
’s in the hallway, sir,” a third voice intoned, so softly Paldor could barely hear through the speaking tube. “He’s just … sitting there, sir, playing with his sword and giggling like … like a schoolboy.”
Silence fell, save for the frightened, labored breathing on both ends of the tube.
“Captain?” Paldor couldn’t tell, from the tone, which soldier was speaking. “Captain, what do we—?”
Shouts and screams erupted from the tube as something—a door, perhaps?—shattered into a million splinters. Steel sang against leather as swords whirled from their sheathes, and the clatter of iron links of chain echoed through the narrow conduit. A dozen voices rose into a chaotic clamor, Sevrien’s own barely audible as he shouted orders that nobody heeded.
Wood cracked, so hard that the floor beneath Paldor’s feet trembled. Human voices disappeared beneath a monstrous roar, loud enough that he heard it clearly from the level below without need of the tube at all. The shouts of soldiers were transformed into shrieks of terror, wails of agony that ended in a series of horrible, wet thumps.
And then, once more, all was silent.
“Captain?” Paldor cleared his throat, hoping to still the quaver in his voice. He fumbled at the tube with sweat-slick hands. “Captain? Can you hear me?”
Nothing, nothing at all—and then, a faint childish giggle, accompanied swiftly by a second, a third, and a fourth. And all of them, each and every voice, sounded oh so familiar.
“Captain?” It was a whisper this time, a breath of horrified unbelief. “Captain?”
The speaking tube clattered as someone lifted it from where it hung, abandoned. “I’m afraid the captain can’t hear you,” a low voice responded. “Or at least he can’t understand. He’s not really himself anymore.”
“Beleren,” Paldor exhaled.
“He should have left me alone, Paldor,” Jace told him. “Everything that happens now is on his head, and on yours.”
-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice
He is also a high level time manipulator. While most people wield chronomancy, Nicol Bolas wields a more advanced version of time manipulation magic called "clock working". This is Tezzeret explaining clock working and some of its capabilities to Baltrice. Here are some of the things he list a clockworker can do.
Jump forward or backward in time
Rapidly age someone
Sense alternative timelines
Move between timelines
They are only limited by the probability of the outcome and their own raw power
“Chronomancy is not even on a nearby plane to clockworking. A clockworker can actually control time. You understand teleportation. To a clockworker adept, time is simply another spatial dimension. They can jump forward and backward in time as easily as you or I might teleport across a room.”
Her frown turned into a scowl. “So if I hit him with something that rocks his world, he can just, like, jump back to right before I hit him and deliver a preemptive smackdown?”
“It’s more complicated than that—clockworking is fiendishly difficult and, no pun intended, time consuming—but essentially, yes. He can also control your own personal temporal flow in ways no magic at our command can counter. No shield will stop you from getting old. And that’s not all.”
She winced. “It gets worse?”
“A good clockworker—which Renn is—can, with proper preparation, move sideways in time.”
“What in the hells is that supposed to mean?”
“You’d have to ask a clockworker for the details,” I said. “I’ve never looked deeply into the theory, and so I have only a layman’s knowledge. The best I can understand is that time isn’t a single straight line—it’s more like a big rope, braided and rebraided out of an infinite number of different temporal strands. Every time you make a choice—turn right instead of left—you split off a new temporal strand. If the choice you make doesn’t affect other nearby main lines—if you arrive at your destidestination at the same moment you would have if you’d turned the other way—your strand gets braided back into the main cable and everything proceeds as usual. But a clockworker adept can sense the nearest strands of other main lines and decide which one he wants to be in. In other words, he can pick and choose the outcome he wants, and move himself into the time line where that’s what happens. And he can take you with him.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. The only limitations of clockworking are the power of the adept and the dictates of probability—the more improbable the outcome the adept is looking for, the more power it takes to get himself into that alternate line."
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
All of the following time manipulating feats are taken from Fake Bolas, so real Bolas would be able to do even greater feats of time manipulation.
Fake Bolas can casually scan different futures for the desired outcome and then cast the necessary spells to achieve that future.
Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open … but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.
The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”
He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the ætheric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades. “How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw—and one felt—the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
With a simple shrug Fake Bolas can timeline jump, completely erasing himself from the current timeline.
The dragon wrapped himself in his wings and with a shrug wiped himself from existence. Even his footprints disappeared from the etherium sand.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
But not only is he capable of timeline hoping but he can move other beings between timelines as well. Fake Bolas displayed this by moving dead Fake Bolas corpses between timelines as well as a Liliana Vess from each of those timelines, and had Liliana reanimate his dead corpse to fight for him.
The dragon reared, forelimbs and wings spreading wide, and brutally intense flame rained down upon the artificer. Baltrice barely managed to raise shields around her and Jace. From what she could see, Tezzeret’s armor seemed to be working just fine. He didn’t appear to notice the hellfire raging around him. He made a quick motion of his right fist, as though delivering a punch to an invisible opponent.
And the dragon exploded.
Right atop the steaming pile of internal organs, Nicol Bolas flashed back into existence. He stretched forth his talon and annihilating energy poured forth, setting the air itself on fire. The power blasted Tezzeret backward and down, sliding into a deep, steep-sided pit of white-hot etherium sand. The fringes of the back blast alone chewed into Baltrice’s shields so fast that she had to grab Jace and dodge back along the plinth to keep them both from being roasted alive.
The dragon kept pouring the blazing torrent of power into the pit as though he couldn’t be bothered with trivial things such as conserving mana. He blasted Tezzeret with levels of energy that should have killed him along with the artificer, as power of this magnitude could be maintained only by pouring his life into the assault along with every scrap of mana he could gather. The intensity of the attack liquefied the sand, turning the pit into a cauldron filled with molten etherium, into which Tezzeret sank like a sounding stone.
And out from which he arose once more, lifting smoothly into the air as though borne aloft by the power that should have destroyed him.
His armor didn’t even look hot.
He clasped his hands in front of his face, and the dragon’s blast was instantly extinguished. He pushed his doubled fists straight downward like a man hoisting himself out of a pool, and the great dragon himself pitched helplessly headfirst into the molten etherium.
A volcanic eruption of flame and burning metal from below blasted upward around Tezzeret without noticeable effect. The effect on the dragon was more spectacular, as his entire head instantly flash-burned to ash, and his neck roared with flame and burned all the way down to his breastbone.
This time two Nicol Bolases appeared simultaneously, on either side of Tezzeret. One simply lashed out and grabbed the artificer, while the other bent his neck to bite the mage in half.
...
Both dragons who had restrained him had been reduced to redly glistering skeletal remains, their flesh having melted and dripped away, puddling beneath their bones in huge pools of meat syrup. But now four dragons came at him, two with magic and two with claws and teeth, and to Baltrice's experienced eye, it looked like Tezzeret was starting to feel the pressure. More and more he started to be focusing on defense, and his counter strikes were no longer instantly lethal.
Not that it would have mattered if they were, as eight more Nicol Bolases came wading through the gore of their predecessors, waiting their turn to attack.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
This battle continues in the backround as the novel describes other events happening for a while, but just based off what is described that is 12 dead Bolas's and each comes with a Liliana Vess. Although since the battle coninues longer than is described it is likely a much larger number that Fake Bolas can pull from different timelines. He continues to pull them from different timelines until he exhausts all the nearby timelines.
With fierce concentration, he cast his perceptions sideways through time, searching the improbability-frayed temporal strands nearby. There were only two or three more time lines where he lay dead on the beach.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
And let me reiterate that this is FAKE Bolas. Clockworking is limited by raw power and Real Bolas is unimaginably more powerful than Fake Bolas.
Bolas can also manipulate souls...
He also hows power over reality itself. He can remove his body a half step from reality making his body impossible to hit.
he dragon protected himself from the attacks of the other gods by separating himself a half-step from reality. The vision of his form remained, but his body was safe from their blows.
The gods of Amonkhet roared and cursed, but no blow from their weapons would land.
-Magic the Gathering: Hours of Revelation
Fake Bolas also has the power to rip open reality and BFR people into the blind eternities.
Then, one at a time, he picked them up, ripped open reality, and shoved each at random into the Blind Eternities. There was no way to predict where any of them might end up, or if any would ever reappear into ordinary reality. While this might be disastrous for unprotected Planeswalkers, the power of Nicol Bolas would preserve them intact until the end of time, and a considerable while beyond it. All Bolas knew for sure—all he needed to know—was that he could bring them to his hand at will. The magic that held them in suspended animation and bound them to him could be broken only by a mage more powerful than its caster.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
These are just his most broken abilities, he also has a plethora of more generic powers. With all of this combined Nicol Bolas is an absolute titan of magical ability
Minds of Bolas
No that is not a typo, that was meant to be plural. Due to being a dragon Bolas has extra brain matter throughout his body. He has learned to compartmentalize these minds and has created sub-brains for himself. He can give any of these minds a complex task to complete and that mind will focus complete on that spell or task, leaving his main brain not having to focus on that task at all.
Here are his minds explained.
Due to their saurian ancestry, most dragons retained great knots of neural ganglia between their wings and at the base of their tails, so large and complex that they were essentially subsidiary brains; the evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to coordinate their subbrains gave many dragons a multitasking capability far beyond any human’s imagination. And Nicol Bolas’s capabilities were beyond the imaginations of dragons.
His mind was a vast and cluttered place, stuffed with twenty-five thousand years of memories, half-forgotten spells, and disordered remnants of dreams and aspirations. Millennia before, he had begun a process of compartmentalizing his mind, setting up an organized mental structure that allowed him to access information he wanted without having to sift through metaphorical mountains of irrelevancies. In the process, he’d split off functions of cognitive processing, virtual minds whose responsibility was the management of each of their particular sectors of knowledge, experience, and skill.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
Should he run out of sub brains and need to do even more things at once he can divide his main consciousness even further.
Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open … but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.
The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.
“I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”
He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the ætheric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades. “How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw—and one felt—the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.
-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal
And all of these quotes are from crappy Fake Bolas. :)
Magik will have a hard time dealing with Bolas because he can focus 100% one multiple spells ate once. Lay down some telepathy, telekinesis, and time manipulation all at once for example.
And to top it all off Nicol Bolas is a super genius with an unmatch intellect out of all of MTG
Conclusion
Nicol Bolas is a 25,000 year old dragon with power beyond that of entire pantheons of gods.
He is a high level time manipulator
He is a high level telepath
He can warp reality
He can manipulate souls
He has all kinds of other abilities
And he can cast multiple spells at once because he has multiple minds.
He is a super genius and is way smarter than Magik
Thanks to Zetsumoto and Chiq for the scans and reading recommendations!
Magik
Burdened by demons not of her own making, she remained an angel at her core
Bio
Illyana Rasputina, AKA Magik, is the youngest out of three siblings, most notable of whom, is Colossus. At the tender age of six years old, Illyana was kidnapped by the demon Belasco. She eventually escaped, and forged her Soul Sword, vanquished the Demon, and became a member of the X-Men
Portals
In reverse order of importance to the debate: portals!
While these aren't overly useful against an opponent like Bolas due to his unique set of powers (and since speed is equalized) but they might be an overall "annoying" factor.
Soul manipulation is made that much harder, due to this (in that, you her life incessant is the sword, and no one can really control it besides her), but she also posses the ability to manipulate souls as well (I am unaware if Bolas even has a soul though):
So at the very least, due to the Soul Swords ability to disrupt magic, stealing my soul should be rather hard.
General magical abilities
Time manipulation
While Magik does possess some time manip, its not her go to though:
Strange states that she has remarkable ability to manipulate time.
She is capable of pulling future versions of characters out of the time stream:
Gallery
Which is a great defense against Clockworking.
Defensive
Magik has strong TP shields that will be incredibly useful in this debate, and nip one of Bolas' major powers in the bud:
And again:
This neatly counters Bolas' TP. And She can also render herself invisible:
Offensive
Firstly, he soul sword is a perfect counter against Bolas, who is a mystical being in nature:
Scans read left to right.
Gallery
Here, she was able to injure *ahem* The World-Eater (shitty name I know) via her sword, due to its nature against mystical beings. The sword also fails entirely against non mystical beings, in that it cant really injure anyone outside of that.
Summary / initial considerations
Since this was a basic opener due to a lack of time, I just covered the basics:
Magik can manipulate time similarly to how Bolas does it, and she can also manipulate souls. Her Soulsword is capable of harming Bolas due to his nature as a mystical being, and she also possess the ability to open portals around the battlefield, allowing her to just pop in and out for quick strikes.
I know Bolas has plenty more to offer, as does Magik, so I turn it over to you, Bantha!
Bolas folded his wings and dived down toward the waves. He banked sharply and slipped between the spires of the Talon Gates. The air between them responded, shifting once more from black to red to blue.
Then the oldest and most powerful planeswalker in Dominaria's history departed, perhaps never to return.
@jardinain2: I'd like to call this debate off. My arguments for Bolas have changed dramatically since we started this and, frankly, have gotten alot better. The way im representing Bolas in this CaV is pretty poor and I could make Bolas out to be much much stronger with the evidence and arguments ive crafted since.
@banthabot: Delete the post, and go again. If you want. If not, I'm pretty busy with school, I just finished the post, but the debate would have been slow anyway.
Log in to comment