Tezzeret Respect Thread

Tezzeret

Tezzeret is a planeswalker from Magic the Gathering and one of the most prominent villians in the lore. Being a planeswalker means that he possesses a planeswalker spark which allows him to enter the Blind Eternities and travel in between the infinite planes of existence in the multiverse.

This thread will be broken down into the following categories. All feats in each category will be displayed in chronological order.

• Basics on Etherium
• Etherium Enchantments
• Strength
• Endurance
• Pain Threshold
• Hand to Hand
• Metal manipulation
• Summons
• Telepathy and Illusions
• Energy Blasts
• Counter Magic
• Rhabdomancy
• Necromancy
• Pyromancy
• Earth Manipulation
• Shadow Magic
• Lightning
• Wards
• Artifacts and Inventions

Because of Tezzerets unique relationship to etherium, his power level changes based on how much of his body is made from etherium and how much etherium he has access too. For the most part this is very easy to track as it stays constant. TEST OF METAL is the only source where it gets tricking because the amount of etherium he has access to is constantly changing. The more etherium he has the more powerful he is.

In most instances in this book Tezzeret is actually weaker, as his arm was comprised of ten pounds of etherium and he didn't have access to that amount. The only glaring exception is when he is on the island made of etherium, which having access to so much of it gives him exaggerated levels of power. I will be sure to point out when ever he is on the island.

How ever here is a guide to help you when you see a source.

In the following sources Tezzeret has a fully organic body, with an etherium right arm.

• The Seeker's Fall
• Agents of Artifice

In the next source Tezzeret has a fully organic body.

• Test of Metal

In the next sources, what I like to call "Current Tezzeret" Tezzeret has an etherium right arm, lower torso, and legs. Only his upper torso, left arm, and head are organic.

• Dark Discoveries
• The Quest for Karn
• In This Very Arena
• Breakthrough
• Puppets

Basics on Etherium

Tezzeret explains that Etherium is a powerful magic-rich alloy capable of holding enchantments. Tezzeret's right arm alone is more valuable than an entire district of Ravnica.

“Etherium. A powerful, magic-rich alloy capable of holding any manner of enchantments. It’s also exceedingly rare, since the secret of its creation is all but lost across the entire Multiverse. This hand is probably more valuable than the entirety of this district.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

A description of the metal known as Etherium. A few important things to note from this passage.

• Etherium can be made to be more durable than steel and harder than diamond.
• Etherium is arguably the most valuable substance in the Multiverse
• Etherium isn't magical, it IS magic.
• Its power can't be exhausted and it can't be unmade
• All the Etherium in existence was created by a planeswalker named Crucius the Mad
• An island made of Etherium is valuable enough to buy a medium sized universe

At the farthest reach of a world that is ocean, there is one small island, and this island is made of metal. The metal has the appearance of age-tarnished silver, or perhaps of burnished pewter, though it can be made more resilient than tool steel and harder than diamond. This metal is not armor, nor paving, nor is it built into structures for shelter. This metal is instead the grass, and the trees, their leaves and their fruit. It is the moss that clings to boulders and the algae in the tide pools, as though some eccentric god had, on a whim, decreed that every material thing on this island be transformed to metal in a single instant. This metal shines in the sun, sings in the winds, and gleams on moonless nights as though gathering starlight against the dawn.

The only living thing on the Metal Island was one lone man, naked on the metal beach, resting on doubled knees, his head lowered as though in meditation or prayer. The island’s metal does not occur in nature, in any form on any world, from the highest heavens to the deepest hells. This metal is called etherium, and it is arguably the most valuable substance in the Multiverse. Etherium is magic.

Not magical. Many things are magical. In the jigsaw world of Alara, a horse can’t piss without splashing something magical. Most magical things are powered by mana; nearly any kind of magical operation is simply a directed use of mana. Etherium is not magical. It is not a device powered by, or used to direct, mana.

Etherium is magic.

The energies bound into etherium transcend mana as lightning transcends a lightning bug. Etherium is an expression of reality itself. Its power is the power of existence. It can be worked with, transformed, shaped into useful structures, but its power cannot be exhausted, and its substance cannot be unmade.

All of the etherium in existence, on any plane or flavor of reality, had been created by one crazed being—known even to his admirers as Crucius the Mad—in an insane attempt to heal the wounds of broken worlds. One day Crucius had a moment of clarity, and in that moment of clarity he understood what he had done …

And he vanished. Forever.

The island is, all in one place, more etherium than can be found in the entire aggregate of elsewhere. It is wealth enough to buy a medium-size universe. This made it all the more remarkable that the man who kneeled naked on the Metal Island’s shore seemed to have no interest in anything outside his head.

He simply kneeled, thinking.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Etherium does not require a source of mana because it is a source of mana. Etherium draws power from outside of the universe (later confirmed to be directly from the Blind Eternities itself) And the power Etherium channels is not finite.

A mechanist is as far beyond an artificer as a dragon is beyond a goose. At the artificer’s workshop, I had learned how ordinary metal, glass, and stone can be shaped to useful ends. In the Mechanists’ Guild, a student is taught the working of magical materials—and how magic can be used to work one’s materials—as well as how devices, machinery, and automata can be imbued with mana, to give them wholly extraordinary capabilities. After one achieves elevation to journeyman of the Guild, one begins to learn the working of etherium. Then, eventually, as a master, one undertakes the construction of etherium devices—devices with, literally, life of their own.

Mana is, functionally, only power. That is, energy—the capacity to accomplish work. A device of etherium does not require mana to operate; etherium is, itself, a source of mana—and, as I learned in my tenure at the Guild, it is a conduit that channels power from outside the universe.

In the service of the artificer, I had been taught that energy and matter are fundamentally one and the same, regardless of the form of either, and that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The only change we can force is to alter its form. Even mana is a finite resource. Etherium, on the other hand …

Well, etherium itself is a finite resource—but the power it channels is not.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret explaining the nature of Etherium to Jace reveals several important things about Etherium.

• It doesn't wholly exist in the universe, instead it simultaneously also exists in the Blind Eternities.
• Tezzeret compares Etherium to having its own Planeswalker spark.
• Again states that Etherium cannot be drained of power because it is a source of power that draws directly from the Blind Eternities.

“Very similar. It is also what the device is made of, the one that is currently inhabiting your central nervous system. The salient feature of etherium is that it doesn’t wholly exist in this universe. Or in any. In ways that can’t be precisely explained in words, etherium simultaneously exists in the Blind Eternities; it is an alloy of æther itself. Etherium, in a very real sense, has a, oh, I suppose you’d say, an inanimate version of a Planeswalker’s Spark. Understanding this is essential for your survival. Are you following me so far?”

“I guess …”

“I know that you will try to remove my device, or deactivate it. You will fail, and the attempt may kill you.”

Well, of course he’d say so. Didn’t make it true. “Go on.”

“First, the device cannot be drained of power, or choked off from its source of mana; etherium, by virtue of its special nature, is a source of mana. Or it channels mana from the Blind Eternities, or carries with it the energy that is reality. As I said, words are imprecise."

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret explains that Etherium cannot be fully manipulated without a Planeswalker's Spark, and so, regardless of power, a plane bound mage cannot fully manipulate it.

“The special nature of etherium also means that it cannot—I repeat, cannot—be fully manipulated by anyone who is not a Planeswalker. My own Spark—my own connection to the Blind Eternities—enables me to do things with etherium that cannot be matched by any plane-bound mage, no matter how powerful.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Etherium Enchantments

Tezzeret learned how to work and manipulate Etherium while on Alara. As soon as he was skilled enough he replaced his right arm with an Etherium replacement. After having his mind destroyed by Jace, Nicol Bolas reconstructed Tezzerets body and mind, this time with an organic right arm. Tezzeret would keep his organic arm for a short while, but at some point before being sent to Mirridon he would again replace his arm with an Etherium enchantment and this time also replace the lower half of his body.

Current Tezzeret has an Etherium right arm and bottom half of his body. Only his head, upper torso, and left arm are organic any more.

Tezzerets right arm, mid section, and legs are all crafted from etherium.

A talented artificer from the Alara shard of Esper, his body is enhanced with the magical alloy etherium, a practice common among Esperites. The most obvious enhancement is his right arm, which is entirely crafted of etherium and suffused with glowing red energy. His midsection and legs are also hollow frameworks of etherium, but he more easily covers those when moving about a world where such enhancements are unusual.

(http://magic.wizards.com/en/story/planeswalkers/tezzeret)

Tezzeret began constructing his right arm at the age of nine

I began constructing my right arm when I was roughly nine years of age. Though my arm’s completion would require more than a decade, and I would continue to refine it for some years after, the process of acquisition, design, and construction actually began when I finally found myself clever enough to steal from my father, which was, approximately, age nine.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Because Etherium is naturally a soft metal most mages lace harder metals with etherium. Tezzeret, however, knows how to make Etherium harder than diamond and more durable than steel. It is a source of power that can never be exhausted, only temporarily depleted after great expenditure.

Most “etherium enhancements” barely warrant the name. Etherium in its unworked state is a soft metal and almost infinitely ductile. Even the richest mages use baser metals that are stronger, and a great deal easier to come by, such as titanium or cobalt. They build their enhancements of these, merely threading the structure through with infinitesimal strands of etherium—only enough to power the enchantments that enable the prosthesis to mimic the function of the part it replaces.

I delved deeply into the mysteries of mana quenching and ætheric tempering, and I invented some variations of my own. No one can do with etherium what I can. In my hands, the metal’s soft and ductile structure can be crystallized until it is harder than diamond but as durable as tool steel. In my hands, etherium needs no mana-sapping enchantments to power its magical muscles. It is instead a source of power, and one that can never be exhausted. Temporarily depleted, yes, by extraordinary expenditures—but not for long.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

His right arm alone consists of ten pounds of etherium. Having that much Etherium attached to his body grants him more power than a gifted mage, and the power constantly renews itself, as etherium pulls power directly from the Blind Eternities.

When my arm was completed, it comprised more than ten pounds of solid etherium from shoulder to fingertip. Merely having that amount of the metal bound to my will allowed me to channel as much mana as a gifted mage—and more, as my arm constantly renewed its power, drawing upon what I now know is the substance of the Blind Eternities itself.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Strength

The following feat is accomplished by a dying Tezzeret after his first ever planeswalk, which was initiated by him getting beaten and stabbed.

Mortally wounded by the guards, Tezzeret's spark ignited, hurling his battered body between the planes to Grixis, where he laid dying.

(http://magic.wizards.com/en/story/planeswalkers/tezzeret)

A dying Tezzeret kills a zombie with a single punch.

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

Tezzeret hits Jace with his etherium arm hard enough to crack his ribs and sent him flying.

With a primal cry, Tezzeret slammed an open palm into Jace’s chest, his own strength augmented by the magics and the mechanisms of his hand. A pair of ribs cracked as the blow lifted Jace from his feet and sent him hurtling backward to land with a splash in the marsh. The manablade flew from nerveless fingers; even had Jace possessed the breath to stand, he’d have had to scramble to reach it.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

A fully organic Tezzeret hyperextends Silas Renn's jaw by smashing it.

Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret disfigures a phyrexians metal hand using his etherium hand and threatened to do worse.

Geth moved to swipe Tezzeret’s neck with his huge claw. Tezzeret merely grabbed Geth’s claw with his etherium hand and in a moment the claw was bent into the form of a five-petal flower.

Geth bellowed and raised his other claw.

Tezzeret held up one finger. “Attention. I will turn your other hand into something more, shall we say, anatomically correct for where I will insert it if you continue this.”

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Tezzeret effortlessly bats away a thopter

The thopter orbited Tezzeret, slicing around his head with its stinger. He batted it away effortlessly as he sent the crawler toward her.

-Magic the Gathering story: In this Very Arena

Tezzeret bends the arm of an automaton built for construction with his etherium arm, crinkling its metal like paper.

"Progress." Tezzeret's footfalls echoed as he clipped across the polished floor. "Show me progress." He wheeled on a dwarf whose name Rashmi had just recently learned was Bhavin. The metalworker was renowned for his massive automatons that were skilled at construction and responded to non-verbal cues. He had placed fourth overall at the fair for his towering construct. "Well?" Tezzeret leaned in. "I don't have all day."

"Right." Bhavin gestured to his invention. "I've made a lot of progress since last time. I've upgraded the functionality of the wrench attachment. It's now able to withstand loads of over—"

"Upgraded?" Tezzeret's tone made Rashmi cringe. "I'm not interested in what you've upgraded. I'm interested in what you've made that's new."

"Ah..." Bhavin shifted from foot to foot. "The joints are newly installed. Your requirement for the maximal load to increase meant I had to ensure the force wouldn't crush the bearings during—" He his mouth hung agape as he stared at his invention.

Tezzeret had taken hold of the massive hand at the end of the automaton's left arm with his own claw, and was bending the arm backward against the joint. The metal crumpled like paper, screeching and screaming like a wounded animal. Rashmi had never seen someone bend metal like that, not without a tool. Tezzeret's metal claw glistened in the light streaming through the windows, and a shiver ran down Rashmi's spine.

-Magic the Gathering story: Breakthrough

Endurance

Tezzeret survives a blast of magic from Silas Renn (pre etherium heart Renn)

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

Protected only by a personal magical shield, Tezzeret smashed through a bronze door, thrown around like a ragdoll, and attacked directly from a drake summoned by Jace Beleren.

The tower’s great bronze door blew completely off its frame like a cork shooting from a bottle. Rending metal pierced the ears and bits of jagged shrapnel dug furrows into the walls. Helpless as a rag doll, Tezzeret landed on his back in the twisted wreckage, blinking to clear his head, wiping blood and particulates from his face.

A cloud of dust filled the chamber beyond, tinged red by the fires below, billowing and rolling to shame the storm. His tattered cloak undulating behind, his eyes tunnels of endless crackling blue, Jace Beleren strode through the cloud, bearing down on the startled artificer. Above him resounded the thunder of mighty wings as the enormous drake that had hurled Tezzeret through the door circled menacingly, dropping ever lower at its master’s call. Its scales gleamed even in the diffuse, abysmal light.

Propping himself up on his etherium hand, Tezzeret scrambled to his feet, initiating a spell of his own. The younger mage never slowed, never broke stride. He merely bowed his head, allowing the plummeting drake just enough room to tuck its wings to its sides and burst through the doorway. Shrieking its primal rage, it slammed into Tezzeret once more, bowling him farther down the hall, claws and teeth raking furiously against a protective barrier the artificer only barely erected in time.

Again Tezzeret found himself flat on his back, struggling to ward off the drake that crouched above him, digging at his shields.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Atrifice

Tezzeret and Jace Beleren emerge from the blind eternities high in the sky and fall to the ground while still fighting each other.

Colors flashed past as they plunged through the outer boundaries of another world, appearing high in the air over a thick copse of trees. Still pounding away with fists and what minor spells they could focus enough to throw, the struggling pair plummeted earthward, crashing through a dozen feet of moss and branches. They finally slammed to a bruising halt in the shallow marsh beneath the boughs, hurled apart by the impact.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Atrifice

The following feats are done against (Etherium Heart) Silas Renn, who boasts that he can shatter granite boulders.

His grip tightened. I heard an alarming crunching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the back of my skull. “Do you know how I practice this hold?” he murmured. “On granite boulders. Until they shatter.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Silas Renn repeatedly beats Tezzeret.

Worse, it seemed that his etherium enhancements, in addition to being impervious to anything I could do with hands, feet, or head, also made him stronger than a rhox berserker. Each blow of his fists opened a cut on my face and shot stars across my vision, or ripped muscles and battered internal organs, or crushed my testicles until I had to vomit bile from my empty stomach, or inventive combinations thereof. “How’s it feel, scrapper boy?” he sneered in my face. “Bet you never thought I could beat you at this too, did you?”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret is thrown by Silas Renn into a metal gate that nearly breaks him in half.

I counted myself lucky that the shock hadn’t made him reflexively rip my head off, but his incredible strength nearly killed me anyway: throwing me aside involved sending me spinning through the air, twisting helplessly until my spine crashed into the arch of the transit gate hard enough that it very nearly broke me in half. Gasping, I fell to the sand, my arms and legs twitching and flopping in partial seizure.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

The following two feats are accomplished by a construct of Nicol Bolas that is not even close to being as powerful as the true Nicol Bolas. This clone, however, possesses enough physical strength to throw a ton of etherium (with Tezzeret encased inside) hundreds of miles.

He snatched up Tezzeret’s body in one hand and with the other gouged a ton or so of etherium from the plinth. 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

Tezzeret, without any etherium enchantments, survives getting back handed by the construct of Nicol Bolas. Although Nicol Bolas wasn't actually trying to kill him.

“You always were clever,” he said, and casually backhanded me with one wall-size fist so hard that I flew across the cavern, slammed into a jagged wall, and sank to the floor, stunned into immobility.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Shortly after this the same construct of Nicol Bolas throws Tezzeret against the cave ceiling. Again, Nicol Bolas wasn't trying to kill him.

To demonstrate the truth of this, he tossed me sharply upward, as a child might a ball. I bounced off the ceiling, got a mouthful of fresh blood when my teeth clacked together and ripped open my cheek, and then tumbled helplessly back into his grasp.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret survives a direct hit from one of Liliana Vess's spells

He had left himself open. A spectral black hand appeared from nowhere and clutched at his chest, sending him staggering back and gasping for breath as the metal shards cascaded down to the ground. But she had sacrificed power for speed, and he didn't fall.

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

And again gets hit by Liliana Vess's death magic and this time pounced on by a zombie and survives.

"You don't know what you're talking about," she snarled, as a pulse of dark energy radiated out from her like a ripple. The ripple bounced off Tezzeret and turned back toward her, tearing his life from his body as it came. She reached for it, calling that scrap of vitality, of soul, toward her waiting arms. Tezzeret clutched at his throat and fell to his knees—where her zombie fell on him, biting and clawing.

She twisted her fingers in the air, claiming a better hold on the magic that had caught hold of his life, reeling it in like a wriggling fish on a line. Oh, she was enjoying this!

She heard a loud buzz just before a hawk-sized thopter clipped her face, sending her sprawling on her back and opening a gash in her forehead. She heard Tezzeret gulping the air and looked up in time to see him throw the zombie off him and stagger to his feet, his eyes burning with rage.

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

Pain Tolerance

Nicol Bolas infects Tezzeret's brain with a creature named Doctor Jest who can trigger his brains pain network. This means that Jest can make Tezzeret feel all kinds of different painful things.

Here Jest makes if feel like Tezzeret's hand burst on fire.

But as I reached for the device, my hand burst into flame—of a sort. I saw a flare of scarlet fire, and I felt my flesh char and peel back from the bone … but my instinctive recoil drew back my hand, uninjured. Not even smoking. And I had seen the flare and the flames only from my left eye.

The source of the pain was obvious. “Doctor Jest,” I murmured grimly. “Interesting. It seems you’re hooked into my optic nerves in addition to my touch/pain network.”

“WOW. YOU ARE A GIANT BRAIN, AREN’T YOU?”

I clapped the hand now to my left ear. The roar had been so overpowering that had it been actual sound, I should have been bleeding from a ruptured eardrum. That I was not, and that I had heard the titanic roar only with my left ear, made its source obvious.

“You can talk.”

“SO CAN YOU.”

Flinching, I could not help pressing my hand more tightly to my ear … though of course it could do no good at all. Bolas must have given this “Doctor Jest” access to my entire sensory system; the incredible roar had to be the result of direct neural stimulation, in very much the same fashion as had the pain. “Um, can you speak a bit more softly?”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Doctor Jest induces the sensation of pain so intense Tezzeret compares it to having his testacies ripped off, slowly.

"Yes yet," he said, and punctuated his reply with a sensation that felt as I imagine it might if someone were to rip of my testicles.

Slowly.

The pain dropped me to my knees. "If I pass out, we both die."

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Doctor Jest makes it feel like Tezzerets entire back of his body is on fire, but then reduces it to only an extreme itching sensation.

“Can you do anything about the pain?”

“Without doing permanent damage? Only this,” he said, and my whole back from neck to heels burst into flame. Metaphorically, but nonetheless vividly.

This cleared up my running problem admirably. Not that I was in any way grateful for Doc’s assistance.

“The human pain system,” he said conversationally, “is an interesting place. Ever notice that when you break your toe, you forget all about your headache?”

I did not reply, as I needed all my breath for screaming.

“Huh, wait—how’s this?” Instead of being on fire, I felt as though a colony of soldier ants had taken up residence inside my spine and was currently exploring its new territory. Thousands of ants marching along under my skin, along my veins, burrowing into my muscles, crawling around the inside of my ears.…

“Tolerable,” I said through clenched teeth. At least it didn’t hurt.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret observes his maimed hand which has had its finger nails removed and part of his fingers cut off during a torture session, and only seems mildly irritated.

He held the hand up to inspect the damage. He had some kind of wire twisted so tightly around his wrist that it was cutting into his flesh. Two of the fingers on that hand were missing their last joint, and all had only ragged bloody splotches where his fingernails should have been. His only reaction was a tiny compression of the lips, as though he were mildly irritated.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret takes the sensation of having his tentacles ripped off with only an involuntary tightening of his eyes.

He underlined his point with a vividly distinct sensation of having my testicles ripped away. I took it with no more reaction than an involuntary tightening around my eyes.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret makes a fine needle out of etherium and stabs it into his chest. He accidently nicks a rib, and then has the needle pull its way through his body until its stabbed directly into his heart and accidently hit a nerve cluster. This entire process hurts a lot.

I then refined one end of the etherium to shape it into the sharpest, stiffest point that raw etherium could hold. That accomplished, I used the fingertips of my left hand to locate an intercostal space to the right of my sternum just above my heart, then brought my sangrite-filled needle there and put its point to my skin, the needle angling to aim behind my sternum.

“Um, Tezz? You mind telling me what you’re doing?”

“In a moment.”

“Seriously. What are you doing?”

“This.” With a sharp movement of my right thumb, I stabbed myself in the chest, driving the whole needle in as far as I could push.

“Ow! Damn it!”

“My thoughts exactly,” I gasped. The pain crushed my breath away—like being stabbed with a rusty gate latch. Must have inadvertently nicked a rib. “But … so far so good …”

“You say that like it’s going to get worse.”

“We met only days ago, yet it seems you’ve known me all your life.” I closed my eyes and wasted some few seconds settling my mind and summoning my concentration; a mistake in this part of the operation might kill us both.

Even if I did it right, it might kill us both.

I hate improvising.

I found the needle with my mind, and I induced tiny projections of etherium to stick out from its front end, then slowly creep along it to the rear, while at the same time causing smooth etherium to flow forward from the rear to become new projections—like a conveyor belt in reverse, or the linked-chain treads of a heavily armored vehicle. In sum, the effect was not unlike the scales of a snake. The threads gave the needle purchase on my surrounding tissue, so that it could pull itself slowly—agonizingly slowly—toward my aortal arch.

“Oh, crap,” Doc moaned. “Oh, you bastard. You do this to me on purpose—I apologized for your balls, didn’t I?”

“This is not …” Speech was difficult through the clench of my jaw. The needle felt bigger than my thumb and as though it was using fishhooks to claw its way through my chest. “… punishment. If even a tiny gap opens in the casing … and blood touches the sangrite …”

“I get it. Ka-boom. Splat. How in the hells did you talk me into this?”

“By not … telling you about it …”

“Y’know, real friends don’t keep secrets.”

“How would … you know?”

“Awww …”

“Here’s a plan …” I gritted. The needle had reached the wall of my aortal arch. “Before we take our swing at Bolas … you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”

“What secrets do I have?”

“You’ll be surprised.” I closed my eyes, and with one spasm of will, I stabbed the needle through the wall of the aorta so that its tip entered the largest flow point in my entire bloodstream.

Doc said, “Golghhg …”

I agreed. The needle seemed to be impinging on a nerve cluster. I felt the stab again with every beat of my heart. “All right,” I said. Pain, yes. But: no shortness of breath, no faintness, no tachycardia—probably hadn’t torn the aortal wall, or not badly, at any rate. “All right. So far so good.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Hand to Hand

Tezzeret uses his etherium arm to defend against Jace Beleren wielding a manablade until Jace makes a mistake from fatigue. Jace has received training from Kallist, and had absorbed Kallist's brain at one point. Kallist is an expert swordsman, and Jace is able to channel his own training as well as his memories as Kallist to produce expert blade work.

Grunting, struggling to wipe the sludge from his face and spitting it from between his teeth, Tezzeret staggered. He sensed the attack coming, heard Jace’s splashing footsteps, and blinked his vision clear just in time to parry the deadly thrust. Etherium grated on etherium, mechanical hand on razor-edged manablade. Each glared at the other as metal screeched and bright sparks flashed, showering to the earth around them.

. . . . . . . . .

Kallist would have been proud.

Channeling the last of his magics into keeping his exhaustion at bay, manablade clutched in a competent if not expert knife-fighter’s grip, Jace pummeled the artificer with a sequence of lightning-swift strikes. Tezzeret retreated before him, parrying frantically with his mechanical hand, lacking even the split second he needed to cast his spells or draw upon a more effective weapon.

The blade darted in and out, a striking viper of etherium and enchantment. A slash at the face, a stab at the chest, cross-step to keep pace with Tezzeret’s retreat; slash again, feint with the left fist, kick to the gut, another step; a twist and sudden spin, a backhand strike against the artificer’s temple, an underhand stab at the ribs, cross-step. For these few moments, Jace drew on everything Kallist had taught him, everything he could recall from several months of being Kallist, and allowed all his anger and all his guilt to flow through him. For those moments, he was a mage no longer, but a dervish of deadly edges and pummeling limbs, forcing Tezzeret ever farther back until the trees thinned and they found themselves slowed by the deepening swamp.

It was a punishing pace, however, one he couldn’t possibly maintain, and both combatants knew it. His face and tunic were soaked with sweat, and his breathing came in labored rasps. Tezzeret’s desperate parries grew smoother and more certain, his retreat more controlled, as it dawned on the artificer that all he had to do was hold Beleren off a bit longer, let him wear himself down, and he’d have the little bastard utterly at his mercy.

And indeed, mere heartbeats later, Jace’s attacks faltered. His arm swung wide, a strike took just an instant too long. With a primal cry, Tezzeret slammed an open palm into Jace’s chest, his own strength augmented by the magics and the mechanisms of his hand. A pair of ribs cracked as the blow lifted Jace from his feet and sent him hurtling backward to land with a splash in the marsh. The manablade flew from nerveless fingers; even had Jace possessed the breath to stand, he’d have had to scramble to reach it.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret has no formal training in hand to hand and hasn't been in a fist fight since he was eleven. However, he is still dangerous as he is a complete savage and fights really dirty when it comes to hand to hand.

Here a fully organic Tezzeret brutally beats Silas Renn.

“Where I come from, this is foreplay,” I mumbled through smashed and bloody lips. “In a fight, we’re more like—” and I completed the sentence by yanking his thumb in a direction thumbs are not designed to be yanked.

The joint snapped with a satisfyingly wet crunch.

“Cesspit scum,” he snarled, his face white with killing rage. “After I beat you unconscious, I’m going to drown you in your own sewage.”

“You don’t have the balls. Remember?” I let go of his thumb, reached behind his head, and grabbed a fistful of powdered glass that I pounded into the ruin of his nose. “This is how we do it in Tidehollow, you snotty upslope bitch.”

The powdered glass spread across his face. I encouraged the spreading by pounding him with the outside of my fist as if it were a hammer. I may not know much about fist-fighting, but I do know how to swing a hammer, and there are few humans who can truthfully say they do it better.

Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch. He howled. In Tidehollow, that would be the moment to pound sand into his open mouth, so I did.

A cave brat from my part of the slum would also twist his hand on Renn’s face, to grind the sand harder into his mouth and into the ruin of his nose, to force it into his eye sockets, thumb it under his eyelids, and pack it into his tear ducts.

I did that, too.

Then I hit him again. And once more for good measure.

And one to grow on.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Metal Manipulation

Tezzeret attacks the mage Silas Renn (pre etherium heart) with metal from his etherium arm.

Tezzeret manipulates metal cables and pipes in order to kill a wounded drake summoned by Jace Beleren.

From both walls an array of cables and pipes burst from their sockets, slamming into the wounded creature’s flesh, releasing bursts of steam to boil the scales from its body. The drake shuddered one last time and was gone. But the protrusions from the wall remained, writhing blindly like the tendrils of some obscene jellyfish.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret runs and jumps and is propelled and protected by metal cables that he is manipulating.

Tezzeret took three running steps and leaped. The hall’s surviving cables reached out, propelling him along or yanking sheets of steel from the wall to shield him from the bursting metal and hissing steam.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret manipulates several wires of etherium and stabs them into his legs in order to feed his muscles extra strength.

My best remaining idea was to run tiny hair-thin wires out of the etherium on my back, and stab them into my hamstrings and buttocks, using the etherium’s innate energy to add strength to my failing muscles and send us along at a very brisk clip.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret pulls etherium from the needle he had preciously punctured into his heart, forms it into a blade, and stabs Silas Renn in the eye.

I chose the needle in my aorta for my first move. It withdrew from the blood vessel, leaving only a bead in place to seal the puncture. With no need for caution, I wrenched the needle back out through my ribs, my pectoral tendon, and my skin. I decided against a bravura line; why warn him? With my mind, I shaped the needle into a thin blade, then stabbed it through the iris of Renn’s right eye.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Later Tezzeret uses this etherium blade to plug into the sleep center of Silas's mind and force him into sleep.

That accomplished, I mentally took hold of the tiny blade in his eye and stretched it into an ultrafine thread, about a third the diameter of a human hair. I sent that back through his retina and along his optic nerve, which must have been a bit uncomfortable, because it made him shudder and moan.

Using the thread, I probed his brain matter until I found his sleep center. Hooking one end of the thread there, I sent the other directly into his pineal gland and worked the thread to feed its small mana current as a trickle charge. In about five seconds his eyes closed, and he relaxed into slumber.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

The following feats take place while Tezzeret is on an island composed completely of etherium. This raises his power level immensely just from having access to so much of the stuff.

Tezzeret said, “Think about the future.”

Bolas hesitated.

“Look around you,” he went on. “Think about where you are, and what this place is made of. Think about who I am and what you have made of me.”

The dragon cast his gaze toward the etherium trees, at the etherium sphinx and the etherium plinth, the etherium rocks and the etherium sand on which he rested. Then very slowly, very cautiously, he adjusted his posture to a feline seated position, wings folded and tail curled around himself, and he looked upon Tezzeret with a decidedly more guarded expression. “So.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret walks out of the restraints that the construct of Nicol Bolas is using on him as though they aren't even there, then throws a chunk of etherium at the dragon, sending the him flying backwards.

“You need to understand that our relationship has turned a corner,” Tezzeret said, and walked out of the Web of Restraint as if it wasn’t even there.

Bolas stared. “You can’t do that!”

“Sorry,” he said. “You might want to take a seat. We should talk.”

“It’s a trick,” the dragon snarled. “It’s some kind of illusion—once you’re dead, it’ll be—”

Tezzeret sighed and lifted his right hand above his head, then clenched his fist with a yank as if plucking unripe fruit from a tree. As though animated by the gesture, the leading edge of the right wing of the Metal Sphinx—a single vast girder of etherium, by itself larger and heavier than Nicol Bolas’s whole body—shrieked through the air and slammed into the dragon just below his wing joint with crushing force.

Bolas folded around the impact, and went skidding helplessly back to sprawl in the sand. His roar of sudden rage sounded a bit thin and wheezy, but thoroughly sincere as he scrambled to rise and gathered power to strike back.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

On the island Tezzeret fills the sphinxes scars with etherium, returning her eyesight.

"Yet I see nothing but blur.” Her great face shone with tears. “And so I have crossed entire universes to see him, this once and final time, stripped away every scrap of my power … only to have my eyes fail me at the last. The final bitter jest in my mockery of a life.”

Tezzeret bent down and took a handful of the etherium sand. “Your Wisdom, if you’ll permit me—?”

She slowly, painfully, lowered herself to lie in the sand like a great winged cat. Tezzeret reached up and laid his free hand gently upon her face, and the etherium sand in his other hand spilled upward, as though the local gravity had somehow been reversed. It gathered into the filigree scars across her face, and then without heat, fused itself there. She blinked, and blinked again, and when she looked up into the majestic face of the Metal Sphinx, she gasped.

Tezzeret said, “I did not invite you here to see you disappointed.”

“Oh, Tezzeret …” she breathed. Tears like liquid diamonds caught the brilliant sun in points of fire. “Oh, my child …”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Still on the island, Tezzeret creates an impenetrable cage of etherium around the construct of Nicol Bolas.

Tezzeret made a fist, and from the sand shot upward girders of etherium thicker than a man’s chest that in an instant had curled around the dragon and braided themselves into an impenetrable cage that flared with every color of power. "Don't try to draw mana, and don't touch the bars. I tell you this for your own protection."

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret then turns the bars of the cage into razor sharp knives and crushes them into a single mass, but construct of Nicol Bolas had already used clockworking to escape the cage.

Instantly Tezzeret slapped his hands together in front of him, interlacing his fingers. The bars of the etherium cage became razor-sharp blades and crushed themselves into a jaggedly solid mass.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret pulls all of the metal out of a phryxians body and drops it next to what was left of the phryxian. Something important to note from this passage is that Tezzeret apparent changes the property of the metal itself multiple times.

Venser brushed the hand aside, but as the fingers and palm dripped back into the wrist, the tips of other claws poked out of the wrist, and another hand grew before his eyes, literally. Soon there was another claw.

Then something exceedingly odd happened. All the metal on the Phyrexian began to arc upward, as though it were dripping upside down. The dark metal of it began to dance and wind, much to the creature’s amazement. Its exposed sinews and muscles looked strangely naked as its whole body began to tumble down without the metal’s support. The metal of the creature’s structure danced higher and higher in the air. The meat parts of the Phyrexian fell with a wet thump to the metal floor. But nobody was watching that. All eyes were on the metal, arcing up and down and side to side in graceful loops and peaks.

The metal turned colors as well—first red, then jet black, and then a bright, shimmering gold. Venser heard Koth’s sharp intake of breath when the metal went a glassy blue. It pulled together into a square shape and fell with a hard thump on the ground next to the crumpled Phyrexian the metal had come from, who looked at it with eyeballs bare and wobbly.

Then somebody was clapping. Venser turned to see a line of Phyrexians different than any he’d seen up to that point. They were twisted and small of head, with teeth coming out everywhere, and their metal parts were shiny. Their hands had small devices and long, sharp tools of chrome attached to them. And standing at the center of them was a human, or most of a human. A bright light shone at his right shoulder. Venser felt his breath catch in his throat as he recognized the metal floating in strips around that radiant shoulder. The strips extended in a fluid motion down an arm that ended in a long-fingered hand. An arm that glowed as much as the shoulder. A metal arm unlike any Venser had ever seen. And as Venser stared, his jaw slack, the being continued to clap.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

The following feat is done to a phyrexian crusher that was described as being easily the size of a small city.

If the first Phyrexian crusher had been large, the one approaching was very, very large. Venser took a step back and almost turned and ran. The creature lumbered forward on huge, crooked legs. It was easily as large as a small city and it dragged its inhabitants on chains behind it. Some were alive, Venser saw, and walking slowly with the chains clipped around their necks. They were mostly humans, and in various states of phyresis. All were armed with swords.

“Moriok,” Koth said. “Shadow-aligned humans.”

Many were motionless bodies being dragged behind. Some were no more than rotted corpses. Venser noticed with not a little bit of unease that many of them were missing their legs. The moving city was made of dull, jagged metal, pocked and wound with sinew and with a single head the size of a dragon propped on top of its amazing bulk. The head, though small, looked all around from deep set eyes. Beside the small eyes, the rest of the space on the head was dominated by a huge mouth of sharp teeth, dripping with bright red blood. Many clawed hands on thin arms hung over its side.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Tezzeret manipulates the metal out of the phyrexian and forms a throne out of it.

The Phyrexian crusher lurched forward suddenly. The sound was so loud that Venser felt like moving the hand he had over his eyes to his ear. The being with the moving metal arm turned to the crusher. “I did tell you,” he said.

He sniffed and raised both of his arms. After a series of motions with his hands, the Phyrexian’s arms and legs were gone—the metal that had once been its legs and arms floated in a ball before the Phyrexian’s face. The creature with the glowing arm turned back to Koth. The ball rearranged itself into a throne of sorts and came to rest on the metal floor. Two blue chrome Phyrexians rushed forward and moved the large seat behind the being. Without looking he sat down.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Tezzeret creates an opening in a metal wall with a hand swipe.

After more walking they arrived at a wall of metal. It was absolutely smooth and extended up into darkness. The chrome Phyrexians stood dripping fluids as Tezzeret stepped forward and made a sweeping motion with his arm. An opening appeared in the wall. The metal Tezzeret had removed hung against the wall, quivering in the glowing blue light from the chrome Phyrexians.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Tezzeret absorbs himself into the metal hand of a giant phyrexian and then burst out of its chest.

But Tezzeret started pushing his head into the creature’s fist. He appeared to be squeezing together into a ball, until only his banded ropes of hair were visible. In a moment even that was gone. The Phyrexian giant opened his hand, and to everyone’s surprise, nothing fell out.

Venser and Elspeth took ten more steps backward. It had worked before when the Phyrexians were searching for their portal. They had been able to sneak away then, why not again? The guide was somewhere in the shadows waiting for them. Elspeth tapped the fleshling on the shoulder as they stepped back. Glissa was busy staring at the giant’s open hand and did not seem to notice their movements.

The fleshling squatted down and with Elspeth’s help, they lifted Koth between them.

Two hands appeared on the giant’s chest. One was metal and one was flesh, but both parted the metal chest as if it was a fallen autumn leaf. Tezzeret’s head poked through the hole, his eyes glowing.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Tezzeret manipulates metal in his battle against Pia Nalaar.

-Magic the Gathering story art: In This Very Arena

Tezzeret summons a collemn of steel to lift him up into the air.

With a broad grin, Tezzeret announced to the entire arena, "And this concludes the Inventors' Fair, everyone. To the brilliant inventors of this world, I say sincerely—thank you." He gave a gracious little bow, and rose from the ground on a column of filigree steel.

-Magic the Gathering story: In This Very Arena

Tezzeret manipulates metal around himself on Kalidesh

-Magic the Gathering card: Tezzeret's Rebuke

Tezzeret manipulates metal in his battle against Liliana Vess

-Magic the Gathering card: Battle of the Bridge

Tezzeret blocks Liliana's death magic with a shield of metal

-Magic the Gathering card: Metallic Rebuke

Summons

Tezzeret summons a mighty metal creature in order to train Jace Beleren. Here are several notable things to take away from this passage.

• Tezzeret summoned the massive creature from only a small lump of metal
• The creature could attack faster than a crossbow bolt
• The creature could self repair by absorbing nearby metal
• While clashing with Jace's drake the impact was enough to shake the cobblestone

He found the artificer in something of a natural courtyard between four buildings that still lay in shambles, untouched by the district’s slow rebirth. Weeds grew up through the broken cobblestones, and the walls were all but painted in a thick layer of bat, bird, and griffin droppings. Whatever rubble might have lain in the courtyard itself, however, had been cleared away; it was all but empty save for Tezzeret himself, who leaned against a wall over a dozen yards away.

“Summon something,” he commanded, his voice carrying clearly across the courtyard.

“What?” Jace, who’d just been opening his mouth to offer some sort of greeting or perhaps an apology, found himself utterly perplexed. “What should I—”

“Summon something! Now!”

Shaken by the fury in the artificer’s voice, palpable even from such a distance, Jace asked no more questions. Still uncertain what was happening, he reached into the æther, stretched his will between the worlds. Before him, a pinprick hole opened in the walls of reality, and through it slipped a cloud sprite, riding wisps of vapor that drifted through from the skies of some other realm—one whom Jace had summoned many times before. She smiled briefly at him, nodding her head in greeting, and then turned to survey her surroundings with an ever more puzzled expression.

Tezzeret lurched away from the ruined structure and hurled something concealed in his etherium fist. An uneven disk of iron, lopsided and bedecked with tiny jagged protrusions, it nonetheless flew straight and true, spinning across the intervening distance until it crashed to the broken stones mere feet from Jace.

And even as it landed, it shifted and warped, calling upon the energies of other worlds, just as Jace’s own summons had. In less than a second, a field of writhing mechanized tendrils, the underside of some horrible iron jellyfish, thrashed across the earth before him. Where they joined with each other at the ground, tiny spots glowed with the dull heat of a smelting furnace, peering out from between the tendrils like inhuman eyes.

Faster than a crossbow bolt, one of the thinnest tendrils lashed out. Its needle-sharp tip punched through the faerie’s wings, pinning her to one of the surrounding buildings by what shredded strands remained. The screech of iron on stone wasn’t nearly enough to cloak the cloud sprite’s terrified scream as a second tendril rose; this one edged along one side, a whipping, flexing blade that gently lay itself across her thrashing torso. Jace tried desperately to dismiss the summoning, to send her away, but so stunned was he by the sudden assault that he left it too late, waited just those few seconds too long. The scream ended abruptly as the tendril pushed. The two halves of her body dropped from the wall, fading before they struck the ground and leaving behind only a tiny smear of blood to show that she had ever been.

Jace turned a furious gaze on Tezzeret. “Why?” he demanded, overwhelmed by a peculiar guilt he’d never before felt at the death of a summoned minion. “There was no reason! There—”

Metal ground on metal as the iron monstrosity struck again, this time with a squat tentacle lacking any edge at all. At full strength, it would have shattered Jace’s ribs, pulped his organs; instead, it struck just hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. His eyes watered with pain and he staggered back, glancing up as it hit him again, blackening his eye and causing it to instantly swell shut.

“Summon something else,” Tezzeret commanded darkly.

“No,” Jace growled, picking himself up from the floor. “There’s no purpose to it.”

“Oh, there’s a purpose,” Tezzeret all but cooed.

A shadow fell over him, and Jace looked up, just in time to see another brutal tentacle, practically a log of iron, snaking toward him. It lifted him up, agony flashing through his gut. When he landed once more, Jace couldn’t keep himself from vomiting up a small puddle of bile. He tried to crawl from its reach, hoping, praying that the thing couldn’t actually move from its spot. An impossibly long tendril wrapped about his ankle and dragged him back before he’d gotten even a yard.

“Why are you attacking me?” Jace gasped, struggling to drag himself out of the construct’s murderous grip.

“I’m not attacking, Beleren. I’m teaching.”

And he understood, then. Understood that while Tezzeret wasn’t about to kill or cripple him, while he was holding the golem back, the beating wouldn’t stop until Jace made it stop.

With a furious cry, Jace called out through the pain and the bitter residue in his mouth—and a fearsome, inhuman screech answered that call. From the sky dropped a great beast, its wings spread wide in the vastness of the courtyard. The bulk of its scales were iridescent blue, its face and horns ivory white, and tendrils of steam rose from its flaring nostrils. For a brief instant it hovered, wings flapping slowly, methodically, as it studied its ferrous foe.

“Better,” Tezzeret offered from afar. “Not good enough, though.”

As though to prove him wrong, the drake surged ahead, twisting almost on a wingtip to avoid a series of vicious strokes as it flew through the thicket of tendrils. It dug its claws into two of the largest, ripping them up and hurling them back against the wall with a deafening clatter. Shrieking its anger, the drake soared up toward the clouds, curling back around until it faced the construct once more. As it neared, its great maw gaped wide, unleashing a torrent of steam so impossibly hot that even Baltrice’s fires might have struggled to match it.

The sharp edges of the iron grew soft and dull, and tiny droplets of liquid metal rained down to the floor around the multitude of tentacles. It reached out once more, but its movements were slow and feeble. Several of the thinner limbs looked ready to give out entirely. The drake circled the yard once more, coming back for another pass that would reduce the construct to slag.

But as its foe turned in its aerial acrobatics, the wobbling golem reached out and slammed a limb into a broken, weatherworn gate, lying before the entrance to one of the buildings. Instantly the iron crumbled into rusted particles—and just as swiftly, the tentacles straightened, whole and hearty once more, with no trace of their injuries save several sporadic scorch marks.

More than a dozen of the tendrils lashed clear across the yard, the force of their attack shaking even the cobblestones, to meet the drake halfway. Bladed limbs flew, claws raked across iron, sparks fell to sputter out upon the ground. And Jace could only cringe as the drake plunged, bleeding, into the center of the mass and slowly faded from view. He felt a sob of frustration and fear begin to well up within and mercilessly crushed it down, allowing himself only a faint gasp of pain in its place.

“Again, Beleren!” Tezzeret shouted over Jace’s shout of denial, of despair. “Summon again!”

He had almost nothing left. Leaning against a wall, breathing hard, Jace watched with wide eyes as the wriggling limbs reached toward him once more. He’d never summoned anything more potent than the steam-tongued drake; it had always been his ace in the hole, a creature that none of his foes could best. He was exhausted from a week of sporadic sleep, aching from the blows he’d already taken, almost tapped out by the summons he’d already cast. Burning hell, he hadn’t even had breakfast!

But he knew, as well, that he could not take another pummeling. It wasn’t that he was concerned about physical pain, not anymore: he refused to admit further weakness to the metal-armed bastard across the way.

Jace sank to the floor, his legs hunched, his back against a wall. In and out he breathed, slowly, ignoring as best he could the metal fiend that drew ever nearer. And he reached, carefully, desperately, for the river that flowed through the heart of Ravnica, past the borders of Dravhoc district. The Rubblefield wasn’t built on the banks of that river, but it wasn’t all that far. Jace’s familiarity with it might just be enough.

He touched her mind and soul, felt her respond to his call. He’d sensed her before, though he’d never known precisely who or what she was, felt her watching him as he sent his senses into the æther, practiced the litanies and exercises that, when put together, would comprise summoning spells more potent than any he’d ever tried to cast. This wasn’t how he’d planned to test himself, to try such a powerful summons, but Tezzeret had taken the choice from him.

Channeling mana from the river as though he himself were nothing but a tributary, Jace threw his power and his will and his need into the void.

The stone wall of one of the surrounding structures burst outward, reduced to a snowlike powder as something immensely powerful struck it from behind. An enormous leonine body squeezed through the gap, cracking the stone farther as it appeared. The fur that coated her sleek form was an unnaturally deep blue, but multihued wings spread from her back, and her head and face were those of a beautiful, and very angry, woman. Her eyes flickered briefly over Jace’s bloodied form, and then to the metallic limbs that threatened him. She hurled back her head and uttered a roar that wasn’t remotely feminine, and took to the air with a leap of her hind legs, a leap so powerful she scarcely had to spread her wings at all before she landed atop her foe.

Her great weight and greater strength brought a dozen tendrils crashing to the earth. They thrashed at her, with razor-edged blades and bone-breaking cudgels. Most of its attacks she swatted aside, a cat enjoying the feeble struggling of a dying lizard. Of those that connected, most rebounded from her toughened hide; only once did the golem’s blade cut deep, drawing blood as blue as the sphinx’s fur. She roared once more, reared high, and came crashing down with all her weight, front paws flying faster than the eye could see. And when she finally stopped and stepped away, Tezzeret’s construct was nothing but a pile of shredded strips, for her claws pierced iron as easily as they would have flesh. The courtyard suddenly reeked of strange oils and base metals.

Jace gave her a smile of deep gratitude, even bowing his head as he dismissed the summons, allowing her to return to her distant home. And then he turned and glared as Tezzeret appeared above him, applauding softly.

“Are you happy now?” Jace spat at him.

“Indeed.” Tezzeret knelt until he could meet the younger man’s eyes. “You’ve learned three vital lessons today, Beleren. You’ve learned that strength unused is strength you do not have, that you should never hold back your full potential. You’ve learned to call allies far greater than any you’ve yet commanded.”

“And the third?” Jace asked, trying hard neither to scream at Tezzeret nor to roll his eyes at this “lesson.”

“You’ve learned that you already strip free will from other creatures when it suits you. What else are you doing, when you summon up a sprite, or a drake, or a sphinx, to fight and possibly to die for you?”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret hurls a tiny shard of metal at an iron box, turning it into a construct of enormous size.

Once and once only, Tezzeret—far more comfortable in the role of hunter than hunted—stopped and turned to fight. Mouthing a complex spell, he hurled a tiny shard of scrap metal. It flew far, and against the wind, to strike the iron box in which the barbarian’s ghostly hound had lurked—and that iron began to bend. It toppled slowly off the wagon, accompanied by the sound of rending metal. And then it rose, a mere box no longer, but a construct of enormous size, humanoid but twice as tall as a human, inhabited by whatever spirit Tezzeret had called from the outer void. It stepped forward with a series of clicks and whirrs, ready to engage the barbarians in battle.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret calls orbs of metal down into a desert that create an elemental made of sand.

A dozen tiny metal orbs rained earthward, bursting as they fell, and from beneath them rose a lumbering giant made of nothing but sand. Its limbs didn’t bend so much as constantly reshape themselves to any desired angle as it glided across the desert to smash the artificer’s foe.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

This golem is so powerful that it kills one of Jace's drakes and wounds the other before dying.

Beyond the nearest dune, the golem of sand had cracked apart beneath the arctic assault, but one of the drakes had given its life, and even as the other raced to aid its master, it flew an erratic path on torn and battered wings.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret tosses a few metal shavings to the ground which turns into a giant golem. Sadly it is destroyed immediately by an elemental.

The artificer ripped his remaining arm free, leaving chunks of flesh behind, and hurled a handful of metal shavings to the earth. Instantly they rose into a towering golem of steel skin and iron gears—and just as swiftly an elemental of swamp-water and cypress trees like the one that had eaten Baltrice’s soldier of fire so long ago appeared once more, bursting from the thickest copse. It fell furiously upon Tezzeret’s construct, crushing it like a cheap toy before it could take a second step.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret has a simulacrum on Kalidesh

-Magic the Gathering card: Tezzeret's Simulacrum

Despite only having access to the same materials and parts as Pia Nalaar, Tezzeret summons an army of metal creatures to his side. Another important thing to note from this passage is that, while he only had access to the same materials as Pia Nalaar, his creatures are created from metals that she can't even identify, which again implies that he is capable of changing the properties of metal.

Tezzeret had already built some silvery crawler of some sort. It unfurled, rising taller than him, displaying an undercarriage of sharp pincers and legs. The crowd clapped furiously. How did he make that from the provided parts? Is he even trying not to cheat? The thopter orbited Tezzeret, slicing around his head with its stinger. He batted it away effortlessly as he sent the crawler toward her.

She quick-fashioned a rudimentary servo, welding its plates into place even as it scurried away toward the crawler. The crawler scuttled forward and tore into the servo, ripping it apart. But Pia had embedded a surprise—a small detonator. The servo burst in a small sphere of smoke and pieces, and blew the legs off the crawler. A huge reaction from the crowd. Maybe I can do more than delay the inevitable. Maybe I can win.

Pia jumped forward to salvage parts from Tezzeret's crawler. Sure enough, it was full of parts she didn't have access to—and even metals Pia couldn't identify. She tore through its chassis and began harvesting it for another creation, hoping her thopter would continue to distract her opponent.

She battled on, folding components together to create radical new designs. But no matter how clever her devices, Tezzeret threw back something that was impossibly faster, stronger, more durable. She was sure she was out-engineering him, yet his devices began devouring her own, consuming her supply of parts.

She turned to dash back to her container, but a pointed metal limb stabbed into the floor beside her, and she fell. She looked up, and saw a newly-created crablike automaton, her thopter skewered on its leg. The thopter fluttered its wings weakly, and went dead.

She glanced over at Tezzeret. He was striding over to her, raising his metallic right hand. Bands of metal curved unnaturally at his will, coiling in on themselves to become a small squad of other sharp-legged automatons. They stood up, a silver-shouldered and faceless army, and began to surround her.

-Magic the Gathering story: In this Very Arena

Tezzeret summons two metal monsters to fight by his side against he Gatewatch.

-Magic the Gathering story art: In This Very Arena

Tezzeret unleashes an army of automotons on the Gatewatch. Several important things to note here.

• Tezzeret's summons are blocking Jace Beleren's telepathy
• Even after they are destroyed Tezzeret can use the metal from his destroyed summons to make even more.

"Chandra," came Jace's voice in her head. "I think his automatons are still blocking my telepathy somehow. You've got to get us in closer."

"Blow up metal things," Chandra thought. "Got it."

As soon as she saw Ajani and Gideon rush to protect her mother, Chandra unleashed. Fire flew, slamming like fists into Tezzeret's machines, felling one after another. One automaton melted on the spot. One got close enough to slice at her off side, grazing her cheek, but it immediately became the rusty centerpiece of a spontaneously-grown vine garden.

At the bidding of Tezzeret's curved metal claw, scrap metal bent and reformed into new mechanisms, crawling under Chandra's blasts of fire and extricating themselves from Nissa's vines. As they advanced, Chandra threw punches that became jets of fire, dimly aware of Gideon and Liliana covering her flank, and Nissa and Ajani crushing a stray automaton that threatened her mother.

-Magic the Gathering story art: In This Very Arena

Tezzeret creates a metal creature on Kalidesh.

-Magic the Gathering card: Tezzeret's Touch

Tezzeret creates a creature simply by pointing at construction materials.

Tezzeret pointed his real hand at a pile of construction materials, and something stirred to life.

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

Telepathy and Illusions

Tezzeret dispels a telepathic assault from Jace Beleren

He had only just begun to laugh, to mock the feebleness of the assault, when Jace’s true attack struck. Pain blossomed through Tezzeret’s head, sunk its tendrils deep into his thoughts. His vision blurred, his stomach heaved, and worst of all, his concentration wavered.

For a moment, one ephemeral moment, Jace might have won.

But he was Tezzeret, master of the Infinite Consortium! He had constructed artifacts beyond the grasp of archmages, stood against foes as potent as the great Nicol Bolas and survived! He would not—he would not—let an upstart like Jace Beleren lay him low!

Grasping fingers of midnight black and blinding blue seemed to emerge from the air around the artificer, wisps of smoke wafting from them, as he gathered the mana running like blood through his veins. Power, pure and uncontrolled force of will, burst from Tezzeret’s soul, snapping the conduit Jace had established with his mind, sending the younger mage staggering with the backlash of his broken spell.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret has often worn illusions as clothing so convincing that they are basically real. They interact with the weather normally, allow items to be held in the pockets and things to hung from the belt, provide warmth in cold weather and cooling in hot weather, and can even provide protection from attacks like armor.

First: clothing.

It should have been a small matter to summon mana sufficient for an illusion of clothing. In previous days, when I’d had my arm, I routinely wore illusory clothing of such sophistication that it was, for all intents and purposes, real. It was solid to the touch and interacted normally with sun, wind, and weather. I could carry small items in my pockets, hang pouches from my belt, and I could fine-tune it to provide warmth in cold climates, keep me cool in warm climes, or even function as armor against physical attack.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

This next sequence of feats is impressive for a number of reasons. First off, because he was busy being chased naked through the streets by giant ember-scorpions, Tezzeret only would have had a few minutes of prep time before Jace and Baltrice arrived in order to set up.

Second is that Tezzeret successfully absorbed his fathers mind into himself and kept them separated (having two minds in the same body) a feat that even Agent of Artifice Jace Beleren failed to do, because he got overwhelmed by having two minds in the same head, and had to hastily put one of the minds in another body.

Thirdly is that, while doing this, Tezzeret had his body covered in an illusion to make him appear to be his father.

And fourth is that Jace Beleren (who's really powerful and main thing is telepathy and illusions) was able to get up close and observe him with telepathy and couldn't see through the illusion or detect that he had two minds in his head. Jace could only tell that there was something off about him telepathically, but he didn't know what.

He was already squinting through the hovel’s door. “There’s something weird about the old man.”

“Yeah?” A little chill settled into my guts. Anything weird is something bad.

“His mind is … hmp. I don’t know. It’s like there’s not quite enough of him there.”

“He’s been a rustweed addict since forever, I think. There wouldn’t be much of him left, you know?”

“Yeah, but …” Jace said, tilting his head like he was trying to listen for something that human ears can’t really hear. “I don’t know. I can’t quite bring it into focus … doesn’t help that he’s drunk off his ass.…”

“Hey, sorry. Next time write me a memo, huh?”

“Forget about it,” he said. “It’s just … I mean, Tezzeret’s not the kind of guy to do magic just for the hell of it.”

“Magic?” A cold shiver flickered up my spine. I do not like to be cold. “I didn’t sense any magic.”

“You’re not a telepath,” he said absently, squinting now through a frown deep enough it should have shown bone. “It’s like … there’s something in there, in his mind, that I can’t quite see.”

That was all I needed to know. I ignited my fire shield and felt in my pockets for Jace’s summoning stones. “You know what? I’m not having fun anymore.”

“Be ready,” he said, low, as he moved cautiously through the doorway, layering shield upon shield around himself until he looked like a man-shaped patch of blue fog.

“Screw ready—don’t you get it? He got here first. It’s time to burn this toilet down to bedrock and run like hell.” I came up as close behind Jace as I could without knocking shields. “Pimple. Nozzle. Change of plan. Kill the old bastard. Now.”

“No, wait—” Jace started.

“Screw wait too.” He had enough shields in place to walk through whatever it’d take to kill everybody else in there. I cranked up myself a Sunball bigger than my butt, which meant it’d make a credible solar flare, but I had to shove Jace out of the way to get the damned thing in through the door. Before I could get Jace clear, the old man dived under the table and rolled out the other side, and the stupid festering skull bangers didn’t even have time to figure out where he’d gone.

The old man rolled up to one knee and snapped his arms wide like he was throwing plates in opposite directions, and in his hands were two little metal toy handbows, comically kid size, neither one as big as the hand that held it,way too small to do any actual damage, which made it altogether sonofabitching astonishing when he fired them both with a couple of high-pitched thocks like squirrel coughs and two little red quarrels not even half the size of a pencil shot out, one into Pimple’s chest right through his armor and the other into Nozzle’s sword arm, and with a noise like fwaptch Nozzle’s arm blew off above the elbow and skittered across the floor along with his sword and Pimple just plain exploded.

While I was trying to get my balance back and at the same time clear Jace out of the way so I could show this bastard what a real explosion looked like, the old man dropped one of the handbows, ripped one of the trestle legs off the table with his bare hands and slung it like a spear at Jace’s chest.

Having just seen something impossible jump out of this bastard’s handbows, I was not prepared to trust Jace’s shields to repel anything at all, so even though the table leg was just a hunk of wood and not even sharp I flicked my Sunball away because it was not something I wanted near Jace if his shields went down, while with my other hand I reached out and flash-fried that hunk of wood so fast there wasn’t even ash, just a puff of white smoke.

What didn’t fry, though, was a little metal gizmo that had been inside the table leg and which flipped right through my best fire like it wasn’t even there. It hit Jace in the chest and sprouted little jointed legs and knives and drills, and it grabbed on to him and started digging through his shields like they were made of grape jam, and right about the time I realized it was made of the same stuff as Tezzeret’s metal arm and that I didn’t have a goddamn clue how to stop it without killing Jace my myself, Jace started to scream.

He screamed like a man watching his children die.

He was bucking and writhing in what kind of pain I couldn’t imagine. I had to do something, but his shields were shredding like smoke, and I realized if I didn’t move back I was about to set him on fire.

That pretty much left me only one thing to do. If I couldn't save him, I could at least for damn sure stop his killer from out living him.

I reached toward the sky, and when my hand came down it was full of sun.

I wound up to throw, but the geezer was just standing there, covered with Pimple’s blood, and his shaky hands were about as shaky as the rock I was standing on, and he was taller now, and younger, and he had a two-handed grip on one of those little handbows which was aimed at my left eye.

“Tell your hirelings outside that they’re fired. Then power down, come inside,” he said, “and I’ll tell you how to save Jace’s life.”

Even if I could have forgotten his face, I’d never mistake that voice. “You bastard—you murderous sonofabitching pile of rotten ratshit scumchucking slugbucket—” I ran out of words because I was too mad to breathe.

“Hello, Baltrice,” Tezzeret said. “I’ve missed you, too.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret explaining what he did to Jace Beleren reveals several important things

• It truly was Tezzeret's fathers mind that Jace felt.
• It was Tezzeret's body all along.
• It was inspired by the trick Jace tried to pull on Ravnica when he attempted to absorb Rhoka's mind into his own.

“It was you,” I said. “It was you all along.”

“No,” he said. “The body was mine, within the illusion, but the mind you felt was my father’s. Inspired by the trick you pulled with Rhoka, in fact—you can be surprisingly resourceful. It was the closest I could come to a prudent course. My estimate of your ability is comprehensive. And apparently accurate.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret cover's Baltrice's arms in an illusion to make them appear to be constructed of etherium.

She got rid of the coveralls, then paused a moment to raise her arms, admiring what was—again, if I say so myself—a spectacularly detailed illusion that they were both conconstructed of etherium.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret uses an auditory illusion to play a message that is so loud that it can be heard for tens of miles.

I activated another prepared spell, this one a very straightforward sonic illusion, which made the sky seem to crack with thunder, and followed with words that might be heard, like thunder, for tens of miles.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret reads Venser's mind before he can block him out.

Tezzeret looked at Elspeth for a long time. Then he turned to Venser and stared at him. Venser could feel a tickle in the center of his brain, and he knew that Tezzeret was searching for truth. Venser blocked the intrusion, but Tezzeret clearly got enough.

-Magic the Gathering: The Quest for Karn

Magical Blasts

Tezzeret sends a guard flying with a magical blast of power.

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

The following two feats are accomplished by a dying Tezzeret after his first ever planeswalk, which was initiated by him getting beaten and stabbed.

Mortally wounded by the guards, Tezzeret's spark ignited, hurling his battered body between the planes to Grixis, where he laid dying.

(http://magic.wizards.com/en/story/planeswalkers/tezzeret)

A dying Tezzeret blasts a group of zombies back with an outburst of magic.

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

A dying Tezzeret completely obliterates a monster with a blast of power

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

Tezzeret blasts away a group of phyrixians.

-Magic the Gathering: Dark Discoveries

Counter Magic

Tezzeret scatters the energy from one of Liliana's spells

Emphasizing that point, while his guard was down, she hurled a focused blast at him, like dark lightning. He threw up his metal hand, blocking the attack and scattering its energy.

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

Tezzeret dispels a soul sucking attack from Liliana Vess

Liliana scowled. "Jace and I..." She trailed off, and decided to finish her sentence by snatching at the edges of Tezzeret's soul and sucking his vitality away.

Blue light shimmered in the air between them, and her magic vanished into tiny azure sparks. "Or has he forgotten?" Tezzeret said. "His memory seems so fragile."

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

Liliana unleashes lethal amounts of death magic in an attempt to kill Tezzeret but he defends by blocking the spells with metal and counter magic.

That was not a pleasant thought. She answered it with a barrage of necrotizing energy—enough to rot the flesh from his bones, drink his soul dry, and leave him a crumpled husk on the ground, if she had been able to get through his defenses. But another stream of metallic shards, like a swarm of bees, caught some blasts. His counterspells negated others, and one blast went wild when a thopter drove itself into her gut, knocking the wind out of her.

-Magic the Gathering story: Puppets

Rhabdomancy

Even as a child Tezzeret has had the power of Rhabdomancy. When he has a sample of a particular substance he has a magical intuition that leads him to more.

He knew as well as I did that I was a better scrapper than he was, and—unlike my ignorant self—he knew why. I chance to have a talent that the vedalken call rhabdomancy. In plain terms, when I have a sample of a particular material, I have a sort of intuition that leads me to wherever I can find more.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret perceives all the etherium in the area using Rhabdomancy

Rhabdomancy.

With only the slightest twist of will, I could perceive the etherium in the area. All of it. Renn’s body. The transit gate. The gravity sleds.

The needle in my aorta.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Necromancy

Tezzeret hurls discs of metal infused with necromantic energy that could drain the life from a sphinx as fast as one of Liliana Vess's spells

He hurled a few projectiles, spinning discs that crackled with necromantic energy and would have sucked the life from the sphinx as swiftly as one of Liliana’s spells.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret cuts off a mercenaries hand and uses a bit of necromancy to heal his own maimed hand.

He stepped over a body part or two on his way to the shocky mercenary in the corner. The mercenary looked up at Tezzeret with eyes like moons on a clear night. “Don’t … come on, don’t …” the mercenary managed to say. “I can … I can help you, right?”

“Right.” Tezzeret leaned down and took the mercenary’s remaining hand as though to pull the man to his feet. When instead he produced the small hooked knife he’d used to cut away the bandages, the mercenary started to scream.

He didn’t stop screaming until Tezzeret had severed the man’s hand at the wrist. It wasn’t a gentle kind of thing. Or fast; the guy stopped screaming because he was bleeding out. When Tezzeret finally dropped the arm, its fountain of blood had already slowed to a trickle. He held the dying man’s hand upright on the palm of his own injured hand as he unlooped the wire around his wrist.

As the wire came free, blood spurted from his two severed fingers—and just as swiftly, the blood stopped, and the last joints of the dying man’s fingers turned black and rotted away. The fingernails disintegrated, and shortly Tezzeret tossed the dead hand onto the body of its dead owner.

“Necromancy,” he said, holding up his hand again, which was now only bloody. His fingertips were back, all his nails were in place, and now he did smile, just a bit. “A useful trick I picked up from an unlucky bandit, when I was just a teenager.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Pyromancy

Tezzeret melts rock until it begins to flow over the opening to a crevice and then allows the cold air to reharden it, forming a wall.

Turning on his heel, the artificer dragged Jace into still another tiny crevice, one that would provide no shelter at all once their pursuers spotted them. But this time, Tezzeret cried out, calling upon every iota of mana he could spare without stranding him on this forsaken rock of a world. To each side of the fissure, the clinging ice melted into running rivulets, the stone grew red hot. Slowly—too slowly, Jace feared—it poured across the front of the crevice, sealing it away from the main chasm. Tezzeret continued to stand, chanting, face sweating despite the cold, and as swiftly as it had melted, the rock began to cool. In a matter of instants, a featureless wall of stone separated prey from hunters.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret summons a wall of molten glass up from the desert.

A wall of molten glass burst from the sands between them, sending Jace tumbling away as it slashed at his flesh and burned away the tips of his hair and the ragged hem of his cloak.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Earth Manipulation

Tezzeret summons up blades of glass and stone from the desert and kills a sphinx with it.

The sands erupted into jagged blades of glass and stone, teeth sprouted by the earth itself to feed a ravenous hunger. The sphinx shrieked as the barrier tore through fur and flesh, ripping her apart even as it held her fast.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Shadow Magic

Tezzeret wraps himself in shadow.

Having mana sufficient for a minor seeming, I wrapped shadows about myself and watched.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Lightning

Tezzeret cracks some glass with a tiny bit of lightning.

Tezzeret unleashes bolts of lightning against one of Jace's summoned drakes that sends it smashing into the ceiling with bone-breaking force, and then follows it up by striking Jace directly.

Looking up, he stared into the maw of the chrome-scaled drake, and thrust both hands outward.

A swarm of tiny projectiles pierced the air, and each was a single tip of a triple-forked bolt of lightning. Scales and flesh blackening beneath the assault, the drake slammed upward to collide with a bone-breaking crunch against the metallic ceiling. Booming thunder rolled down the hall, dispersing the dust and knocking Jace off his feet.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret reminisces that before his reconstruction by Nicol Bolas, his plan to fight (Etherium Heart) Silus Renn would be to confuse his forsight with etherium dopplegangers and then bombard him with an overwhelming amount of lightning.

"The old me—the angry man with the etherium arm—would no doubt use this etherium to devise several Tezzeret doppelgangers of some sort, thinking to use them to confuse Renn’s foresight, as cover for a lightning sally of overwhelming destructive force.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Wards

Given very lengthy preparation Tezzeret was able to set up wards that bound Tezzeret and Nicol Bolas from attacking each other.

“Not at all. I only agreed to this meeting if we could each set up wards in advance, ensuring that neither of us can attack the other. And we’ll be arriving early, to double-check those wards.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Nicol Bolas states that the only reason he isn't killing Tezzeret right now is because of the wards.

“Shut up.” Bolas shifted his head, causing a small avalanche of ice and rock to pour down from the ledge against which he stood. “I hate you, artificer, and I find rare cause to bother hating anyone anymore. The only reason I’m not currently picking your spine out from between my teeth is because you were smart enough to arrange these wards ahead of time."

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Nicol Bolas admits that by the time it would take for him to break the wards, Tezzeret would have been able to escape.

“You can’t touch me, Bolas!” Tezzeret insisted, drawing himself back to his full height even as his body began to shake for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold. His left hand was behind him, hovering over a pouch of implements and tools, while his prosthetic was raised high, ready to cast a battery of potent spells. “Whatever you’re accusing me of doing outside this place, the wards bind you while you’re here!”

The dragon’s laughter thundered through the canyons and set the snow atop the nearest mountains to quivering. “Little artificer, you are absolutely correct. I am bound by the same wards you are, and you would be long gone by the time I could break them.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Atrifacts and Inventions

Tezzeret specializes in blue artifice magic, and is capable of bringing artifacts to life.

Tezzeret seeks perfection of body and mind. He specializes in blue artifice magic: spells that forge and manipulate artifacts, sometimes even bringing them to life.

(http://magic.wizards.com/en/story/planeswalkers/tezzeret)

While on Alara Tezzeret studied at the Mechanist's Guild. The normal time frame it takes for someone to become a master is seventeen years but Tezzeret became a master in five.

The normal progress through the Mechanists’ Guild from student to master is seventeen years; seven years as a student—essentially an apprentice, save that one must pay for the privilege—and ten years as a journeyman. I was a master in five

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret throws an artifact that releases magical vapor that knocks out two guards.

-Magic the Gathering: The Seeker's Fall

Tezzeret has a device that matches and cancels sound, allowing them to have a private conversation in a public café without being heard. The only way other people could hear them is if they all started yelling at the top of their lungs.

Tezzeret interrupted with a raised hand, which clutched a peculiar device in its metallic palm. A pyramid of strange metal, neither the odd substance of the false hand nor any of the more mundane alloys with which Jace was familiar, it boasted a number of tiny holes, and shuddered faintly with the clicking and turning of miniature gears within.

Taking the object with his left hand—a hand of normal flesh, that one—he held it out toward Jace. “Speak into the device, please,” he asked.

Puzzled, Jace furrowed his brow. “What should I say?”

Tezzeret smiled. “That’ll do nicely.” He placed the device in the center of the table, and seemed content to wait.

The clicking and thumping of the device grew louder, faster, until the entire table vibrated. And then the mechanism reached some predetermined threshold, and the sounds faded entirely, except for a faint background hum.

All the sounds faded—not merely those of the device, but the hubbub of the tavern, and the noises of the city beyond as Ravnica’s nocturnal citizens went about their business in the darkened streets. Jace gawked at Tezzeret, unbelieving.

“It matches sounds,” the other explained, “and nullifies them. That’s why it needed a sample of your voice. We’ve already provided ours. Noises from without, unless they’re really loud, cannot reach us—and our own voices, assuming you don’t feel the need to start screaming at the top of your lungs, cannot be heard by any beyond the table.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret uses an Infinity Globe against Jace Beleren, allowing him to physically interact with him in the Blind Eterenities even though that shouldn't be possible.

Then, summoning the last of his reserves, Jace had the long moments he needed to draw together the surrounding threads of mana and begin to walk.

Slowly, too slowly, the curtain of haze materialized before him and Jace stumbled through. His last sight was of Tezzeret standing amid a whirling wall of illusory wings, and removing a dark globe from a pouch on his belt, doubtless a weapon he’d never get to use.

As the chaos of the Eternities pummeled him, Jace breathed a sigh of relief. Even if Tezzeret had seen him go, even if he’d slain the drake the moment Jace vanished, it would take him minutes if not hours to follow, and by then Jace would be long—

Tendrils of entropy and probability rippled, coiling upward and in on themselves, and Tezzeret stood before him, a vicious grin on his face and a vile gleam in his eye. No hesitation, no delay—he was simply there. In all the Blind Eternities, nothing had ever shocked Jace more thoroughly. He stared at the artificer’s soul, an abomination of blood and metal, of hatred and greed, and he could not move.

It wasn’t possible, it wasn’t…

Tezzeret clutched Jace by the collar and shoved, muscles and magic working in tandem to carry them back through the barrier of worlds. They reappeared a dozen feet above the desert floor and crashed painfully to the ground.

Jace, too stunned by the sudden assault even to draw breath, felt the remaining air rush from his lungs, felt fire flash across the back of his head at the impact, and then the blinding light of the desert went mercifully black.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Lilliana Vess explain what an Infinity Globe is to Jace Beleren.

• Its made of a tightly packed etherium filigree.
• It provides a lot of power quickly instead of having to focus
• Other planeswalkers can use them but its easier for Tezzeret

“Infinity Globes,” she said, not allowing time for further questions. She lifted a pair of small dark orbs. “It’s what he used to follow you when you tried your ‘tactical withdrawal.’ I understand he started work on them after the two of you had trouble escaping from Bolas’s berserkers a few years ago.”

Jace nodded, remembering how near they’d both come to dying that day.

“As I understand it,” she continued, “They’re made of an etherium filigree, so tightly packed it’s almost fused. It provides a lot of the power you’d normally have to focus from the world around you, so you don’t need to spend more than a few seconds in concentration. It’s easier for Tezzeret, thanks to his etherium arm, but they should work for us as well.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Jace Beleren uses an Infinity Globe to planeswalker very quickly.

And then the little bastard waved at him and produced a damned Infinity Globe from somewhere up his sleeve. It pulsed once, twice, attuning itself to the beating of its wielder’s heart. Then Beleren was simply gone, nothing but a few wisps of mana-vapor to show that he’d been present at all.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Jace Beleren uses an Infinity Globe to attack Tezzeret in the Blind Eternities and the two have a battle, even though this shouldn't be possible.

Tezzeret appeared in the Blind Eternities, colors and probabilities ebbying around his feet, mixing to form liquid dreams. He knelt in the unreal substance, glowing with restrained power, as he searched for his quarry’s trail. Beleren couldn’t have gotten far, not even allowing for the strange stuttering and skipping of time here in the void; the trail of his Spark should be visible still, if he could only find its end.

And there it was, a wake of æther slowly dissolving into the surrounding essence, a flickering ribbon of liquid fire.

Tezzeret blinked. It didn’t lead off into the vastness of the Eternities, as he’d expected, but rather curved, almost as if …

His scream unheard in the pounding of the Eternal winds, Jace Beleren slammed into Tezzeret from behind, his entire body alight with magics. Instantly they left behind them the sheet of light that marked the edge of the world, propelled by Jace’s will alone through vast impossibilities where even direction and gravity were matters of mere desire. They hammered at one another, with bursts of unfocused power that might, within the bounds of conventional reality, have taken the form of spells but here were little more than primordial energies burning flesh and mind and soul. They hammered at one another with sheer malevolent intent, their very notions warping the streams of chance around them into stabbing blades and poisonous thorns. And they hammered at one another with fists and knees and elbows, a pair of brawlers rolling among the planes.

Where blood and eldritch essence spilled from their wounds, impossible forms of life arose, creatures that did not and could not exist in any sane world, and died as swiftly, torn apart by the currents of the Blind Eternities.

And in time that was not time, they were there.

Colors flashed past as they plunged through the outer boundaries of another world, appearing high in the air over a thick copse of trees.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Atrifice

Tezzeret has an orb attached to his etherium arm that keeps him warm in the middle of a blizzard.

He huddled in a heavy, fur-lined cloak, wrapped about him and held with arms crossed over his chest. Even through his scarf, he saw tiny puffs of mist with every breath. Yet Tezzeret, who was clad in leather leggings and a heavy vest with multiple pockets and straps, looked quite comfortable. From the forearm of his prosthetic hung a brass globe, attached as though with some sort of magnetism or adhesive. It glowed a warm orange and emitted a low hum that made Jace want to reach into his own head and scratch his eardrums until they stopped itching.

And possibly to punch Tezzeret in the mouth for bringing only one.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret uses a device that enhances his eyesight and allows him to see clearly through a blinding blizzard and greatly enhances the distance he can see.

He dashed around a sharp bend in the canyon wall, bodily yanking a panting Jace after him. From his pouch he yanked a crystal sphere, the same he’d used to spy on Jace during Baltrice’s test. Holding it to his eye, sharpening his vision far beyond what might qualify as human, he peered back around the corner.

Distance meant nothing; the falling snow ceased to blur his sight. He saw several dozen men scaling the chasm walls like spiders, some not even bothering with ropes to aid their descent.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret uses sand that had been filled with enchantments to teleport both himself and Jace Beleren a great distance.

The artificer landed in a crouch mere feet before his enemy, his etherium hand already darting out to parry the shrapnel Jace had telekinetically hurled at him as he came. In that metal grip Tezzeret clutched a fistful of sand, glowing visibly with prior enchantments and the power of the spell he pumped into it now.

His fist tightened further, and the particles sifted from between his fingers, pouring into the air and swirling around both combatants, an embryonic dust devil that swiftly grew into a raging whirlwind. Long after the initial fistful was expended, the sand continued to flow, to whip about them, until cloak and hair thrashed wildly and all sight of the surrounding hall was obscured.

Jace felt the temperature rise into a baking heat that lay heavily upon him and brought an instant sweat to his skin. Even as he readied a counterspell intended to shield him from the worst of the pounding heat, he felt the rigidity of the metal beneath him give way to the unstable shifting of the desert floor. The sandstorm faded to reveal an endless expanse of wastes, only the very tip of Tezzeret’s tower visible over the distant horizon. Despite the warmth Jace tugged the hood of his cloak over his face, shielding his watering eyes from the brightness of the midday sun.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret explains that given a few months he could build a device that gives Tezzeret control over the parts of Jace Beleren's that allow him to use telepathy. Not only this but Jace Beleren would be conscious and aware of what is happening to him.

“You are alive,” the artificer said, “partly because I want to give you some time to truly comprehend the depths of my disappointment—but mostly because I require a few months to complete my arrangements for you. You see, Beleren, since I’ve actually managed to take you alive, I’ve decided your talents are too valuable to waste. Mind-reading is a precious commodity indeed."

“So if I cannot trust an agent to perform such tasks for me, I’ll simply have to construct a device to do so. An artifact that will preserve and manipulate the portions of your brain that allow for such wonders.”

Despite himself, Jace felt the urge to fall back from the image on the wall.

“I should think,” the artificer said with an oily grin, “that if I build the device just right, I can retain enough of your persona that you’ll remain conscious and aware of what’s happened to you, without the slightest ability to do anything about it.”

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret actualy completes a prototype for this device, but it is destroyed by Jace Beleren.

“There, if you would,” he said, indicating a rough seam. She nodded, tensed in brief concentration, and sparks flew as the metal welded itself together.

“Enough. I think that’s as done as it’s getting.

” Baltrice frowned at the pronouncement. “Really?” She reached out and tapped the many thin protrusions, then the glass reservoir filled with a viscous green fluid. “It doesn’t look all that sturdy to me, boss.”

“I wouldn’t take it into battle,” he agreed, “but it’ll do until I can devise a more portable version. We’ll need a brain to test it on first, of course, but barring any unforeseen flaws, I think Beleren’s about to find himself moving to slightly smaller quarters.”

Baltrice snickered, a sound that transformed abruptly to a shout of pain as the reservoir bulb shattered, spraying glass shards and its caustic contents across her skin. She struggled to clear her eyes with a sleeve as Tezzeret, utterly bewildered, gawped at the ruins of his creation.

-Magic the Gathering: Agents of Artifice

Tezzeret had built a trap out of etherium, that, if triggered by anyone other than himself, would penetrate their nervous system with threads of etherium and induce permanent paralysis until they died.

Being a mechanist, when I went to hide a substantial amount of etherium, I had seen no reason to stash it as bullion or bars … and I have always had a knack for small, intricate automata. I had fashioned the entire stash into a trap—and a rather nifty one, if I do say so myself.

This trap would fishhook the hand of anyone other than me at first touch, and insinuate a network of hair-thin etherium wires transdermally, to hijack the thief’s nervous system and magically override the voluntary motor nerves, inflicting permanent paralysis. This would leave the thief alive, awake, and aware, but unable to do anything save, oh, for example, die of thirst. Or drown in a particularly large dumping of trub. Or meet some other unpleasantly lingering death.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret attached an etherium device to Jace Beleren which inhabited his central nervous system and caused him excruciating pain when ever he attempted to channel magic. Jace attempts to channel magic twice here, first to raise a defensive shield, and second to attempt to mind read, both times the device activates and causes excruciating pain.

“Don’t do any magic, Jace. You hear me? No matter what happens. Don’t do anything.”

“What …? What? Why not?”

“Because,” said a voice I hear in nightmares, “that will make a bad situation even worse.”

And I turned my head, and there he was, just standing, standing and smiling and it was instinct, or training, or practice, that snapped my shields into existence and whichever it was didn’t matter at all because before my shields could even fully form, a blast of agony whited out the world. This time, I remember screaming.

I didn’t quite pass out, even though it felt like a lightning bolt had exploded inside my head. It had me convulsing in Baltrice’s arms, and I thrashed for a lifetime or two until I finally let go of the magic. When my vision cleared, he was still standing there. He wasn’t even watching, though I could feel his attention attached to me, the sort of link I can back-chain almost without effort and get into his mind—

This time rats were chewing through my skull. From the inside.

Within a second or two the pain shredded my concentration; even the most basic telepathy was shut behind a door locked with agony. All I could do was lie there across Baltrice’s knees. Lie there and look at Tezzeret and wait to die.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret tells Jace that, while he has never before observed how much pain a human nervous system can withstand without sustaining permanent damage, attempting to planeswalk while the device was inside of him would most likely kill him.

The moan had finally gotten Tezzeret’s attention, but only for a second. He gave me a level stare for maybe a heartbeat, then went back to work on his hand. When he spoke, he sounded distracted. Affectless.

Like a machine.

“Beleren. I have never verified how much pain a human nervous system can endure without permanent damage. Nor do I know whether a person can be killed by pain alone—if you can ‘hurt to death,’ as it were. If you try something as extreme as planeswalking, we likely will find out.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Because it is made from etherium it cannot be choked off from its mana source, and the only beings who Tezzeret believes could remove the device would be Crucius the Mad, and himself. (Although Tezzeret doesn't admit it, I will also credit Nicol Bolas as being able too)

“Very similar. It is also what the device is made of, the one that is currently inhabiting your central nervous system. The salient feature of etherium is that it doesn’t wholly exist in this universe. Or in any. In ways that can’t be precisely explained in words, etherium simultaneously exists in the Blind Eternities; it is an alloy of æther itself. Etherium, in a very real sense, has a, oh, I suppose you’d say, an inanimate version of a Planeswalker’s Spark. UnderUnderstanding this is essential for your survival. Are you following me so far?”

“I guess …”

“I know that you will try to remove my device, or deactivate it. You will fail, and the attempt may kill you.”

Well, of course he’d say so. Didn’t make it true. “Go on.”

“First, the device cannot be drained of power, or choked off from its source of mana; etherium, by virtue of its special nature, is a source of mana. Or it channels mana from the Blind Eternities, or carries with it the energy that is reality. As I said, words are imprecise.

“You have experienced already the sort of pain that attempting magical operations can cause. You need to understand that even worse effects will be created by someone using magic on you. You also need to know that analgesic treatment, up to and including magically deactivating your brain’s pain center, will only hasten your death. It would be a death you wouldn’t want me to even describe. Trust that it will be torment that transcends description.“

"The special nature of etherium also means that it cannot—I repeat, cannot—be fully manipulated by anyone who is not a Planeswalker. My own Spark—my own connection to the Blind Eternities—enables me to do things with etherium that cannot be matched by any plane-bound mage, no matter how powerful.”

“So I’d have to find a Planeswalker to turn this thing off.”

“One particular Planeswalker,” he said. “Me. Unless you know of another Planeswalker who is a mechanist of my ability. To the best of my knowledge, there has ever been only one other being with the requisite abilities, and he has been lost in the infinite reach of the Blind Eternities for decades. Nicol Bolas himself can’t find this being. Nothing that can be done by you or anyone you can find will work, and any serious attempt will likely kill you. Your best course is to resign yourself to your situation, and console yourself that it is temporary.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret also constructs this device so that if Jace is ever mind read by the construct of Nicol Bolas it will begin to inhabit his brain instead. Here are some important things to note from this passage.

• This was done after a very long time of preparation on Tezzeret's part involving him killing many different Constructs of Nicol Bolas in different timelines.
• The device was transferred from Jace Beleren to the construct of Nicol Bolas after the dragon mind read Jace
• The device doesn't inflict pain as a response for channeling magic anymore, instead it takes away any motivation that Nicol Bolas had for attacking a planeswalker.
• Tezzeret took away the construct of Nicol Bolas's ability to use clockworking and gave it t one of his sub-personalities.
• Tezzeret infected the construct of Nicol Bolas with Doctor Jest.

Kill me,” Tezzeret offered. “However you like. I have no shields and have summoned no magic. You can just step on me, if nothing else; it’s how one customarily destroys cockroaches.”

Bolas growled deep in his throat and lunged for him, talons poised to rip the artificer into bloody shreds.

But he didn’t.

“Because you can’t. Well, you can … but you won’t. Not for a while, at least.”

Tezzeret’s smile reminded Bolas of something unpleasant. With a lurch, Nicol Bolas realized that the smile looked like one he himself liked to show from time to time. Usually when someone he was about eat broke down and began to beg for their life.

But in Tezzeret’s smile there was no sadism. Not even malice.

That, somehow, made it worse.

Bolas began to wonder, for the first time he could remember in all twenty-five thousand long years of his life, if he might be out of his depth.

“I should think you know me as well as any creature in the Multiverse, excepting only Kemuel and Crucius,” Tezzeret said. “What’s my talent? Not superficial, magic and rhabdomancy and artificing. What am I best at? What is my specialty?”

Bolas opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but shut it again without speaking. Shut it with a snap like a dry branch breaking, because he realized he did know Tezzeret’s specialty.

Preparation.

“I want you to understand why I’m revealing what I’ve done to you in this particular way,” Tezzeret said. “There is a lesson I hope you will take from this, and the only way I can be sure you’ve learned it is if you see it yourself.”

“Games,” said Nicol Bolas sourly. “Aren’t I too stupid to understand the rules?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I hope you do, at least, understand the stakes,” said the artificer. “We’re playing for your life.”

Bolas sat, folding his wings about himself in what he hoped might look like nonchalance. He’d suddenly become very cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering.

“Do you remember what I said to Jace Beleren, right after my device settled into his brain?” Bolas had no need to search his memories for that particular tidbit. “You said you were going to kill me.”

“Yes. And I did.”

“Are you mad?”

“I killed you dozens of times,” Tezzeret said. “Remember?”

Bolas thought of the corpse dragons he had pulled from parallel time lines, and he discovered he was getting colder rather than warmer.

“I kept on killing you,” Tezzeret said, “until finally I found a Nicol Bolas I didn’t have to kill. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand who you are and why you are this way?”

Bolas swallowed.

“You don’t have to answer. Only think. The device I put in Jace’s brain was there not because I feared he’d interfere with me. I put that device in there because I knew you would read his mind. Someday. Somewhere. And when you did, that device would flow into you right along with Jace’s memories. Once that was done, I could kill you …” He shrugged. “Whenever. Any time I happened to feel like it. Because that device is in your brain now.”

Tezzeret sighed apologetically. “The tricky part was programming it to reach the proper neural nexus in your brain. A bit of trial and error there, thus a few extra dead dragons on parallel beaches. I’m sorry for that, by the way.”

Bolas snorted. He’d felt not the faintest sting, let alone the shattering agony that Tezzeret’s device had inflicted upon Beleren. He opened his mouth to express just how pathetically contemptible Tezzeret’s little charade had become, but the artificer held up a hand.

“It’s not there to hurt you. It’s more of a short circuit than a punishment—and besides, I suspect your pain tolerance is beyond the capacity of any device to surpass.”

Bolas blinked. That had sounded almost like a compliment.…

“Basically, it shuts down your motivation to kill me. Or any Planeswalker. I decided I could spare that much mercy for Jace … at least partially because I could so vividly imagine the look on your face when you discovered you couldn’t hurt him.”

Bolas could think already of a dozen ways to get that device out of his brain, and once he did—

Again, Tezzeret seemed to be reading his mind. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if it took you more than ten minutes to remove it. But it gives us the opportunity to have this chat.”

Bolas had a different chat in mind. With a very subtle, impenetrably camouflaged exertion of mana, he reached out for a time line where he had never used his mind siphon on Beleren. A quick temporal shift, and matters between him and Tezzeret would be different.

Lethally different.

But he couldn’t. The time lines simply weren’t there … or, worse, he couldn’t see them. The cold seemed to have penetrated his bones. He sent his perceptions forward and back along the time line he was already in … except he didn’t. He couldn’t.

He remembered being able to clockwork. He didn’t remember how.

Tezzeret nodded sympathetically. “You have to keep in mind that I had a long time to prepare for our meeting on this beach.”

“Apparently so.”

“I have come to believe that clockworking in general is a very bad idea. Even in the hands of a well-intentioned mage, it has the intrinsic potential to rend the fabric of the Multiverse—which makes it a particularly bad idea to let you, for example, use it. So you can’t. Possibly forever.”

Bolas could no longer contain his disbelief. “That’s impossible—you can’t just take a power away from me!”

“Yes. The only person who can do that to you is, well … you.”

“What?”

“Jace Beleren wasn’t the only one with a trap in his mind,” Tezzeret said. “This one was a little subtler. I’ve given your clockworking powers into the care of a subpersonality of yours. I based my design on your work. This subpersonality actually understands how dangerous clockworking is, and so he’ll make sure you never do it again. I have given you something more valuable than all the etherium that has ever existed.”

He smiled, and now Bolas did see a trace of that malice that had been formerly absent. Tezzeret said, “I’ve given you a friend.”

“What?” Bolas thought for a moment that his eyes might bulge right out of his skull. “You didn’t—you couldn’t possibly—”

“Doc,” said Tezzeret, “say hello.”

And Nicol Bolas heard a thinly wiseass human voice buzzing in his left ear. “Hiya! Hey, it’s nice in here! Damn, Nicky, we shoulda got together years ago!”

Tezzeret looked unconscionably pleased with himself.

For one horrible second, Bolas was afraid that for the first time in twenty-five millennia, he might actually burst into tears.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret had constructed two gravity sleds out of etherium. Each was held aloft by levitation magic

• Each was held aloft by levitation magic.
• Each had energy shields that protected against the sun of the desert, and the dangerous wind of the Glass Dunes.
• Each had only two moving parts.

A simple exertion of will twisted the levitation fields of our gravity sleds and dropped them both to the white sand. The gravity sleds had proven to be almost ridiculously useful up till now. Having designed and constructed them myself, I could take a certain pride in how well they had performed. Both were virtually pure etherium, representing the entire contribution of the Grand Hegemon to this expedition—her personal reserve of etherium, almost seventy pounds. The variable levitation magics—to provide motive power in addition to keeping them aloft—were quite standard, even pedestrian; the particular elegance on which I prided myself lay in the shimmering blue variable energy screens that had not only protected us from wind and sun, but also shielded the sleds themselves from the incredibly abrasive winds of the Glass Dunes, not to mention that the sleds themselves had only two moving parts.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret later explains that the sleds are fast enough to cover 15 miles in less than two minutes. That's around 450 miles per hour.

"If the gate fails somehow with you on this side of it , remember that your sled is very fast. We're only fifteen miles out, which that sled can cover in less than two minutes from a standing start."

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret had also constructed an ear piece for Baltice that allows him to communicate with her from a distance, and also has a shield like the sled to protect her from the Glass Dunes.

“What’s wrong?” Baltrice’s voice came to my mind just slightly muffled by the anti-grit screen I had tweaked into her earpiece—a smaller and lower-powered version of the screens that protected the gravity sleds. Channeling the extra magics had forced me to almost quadruple the size of the earpiece and to build in a support band that Baltrice wore around her head. Not fashionable, perhaps, but it would keep her alive.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret manipulates an etherium device and turns it into a sort of telescope like device that allows him to view the Crystal Lanyrinth as though it were meters away instead of 15 miles away.

I turned my hand downward, and the tiny forescout device lifted from the sand. Spreading my fingers thinned and expanded the device into a hoop of etherium as wide in diameter as my arm was long. A simple adjustment of the refractive index of the air within the hoop made a section of the Crystal Labyrinth spring into focus as though we were only yards away, instead of miles.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret uses the etherium from one of the before mention sleds to craft rerebraces, vambrances, gauntlets, and grieves.

“Not quite,” I said, a bit abstractedly because most of my attention was focused on fashioning greaves and sabatons out of my sled’s remaining etherium, while reserving enough for rerebraces, vambraces, and gauntlets.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret then worms tiny etherium wires under his skin and connects the armor to his motor neurons allowing him to control the armor the same way he was able to control his etherium arm.

That being accomplished, I focused my will to once again draw from the plates threads of etherium finer than hairs. The hand being relatively more sensitive than the chest and back or the legs, worming those threads in through my skin for the direct connection to my motor neurons was exceptionally uncomfortable, rather like dipping my hand in boiling water. But the direct connection would allow me to use the armor much in the same way as I had used my erstwhile right arm: as an extension of myself.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

This armor comes with a fire shield that allows him to walk through a crowd of millions of zombies casually. Any zombie that tries to touch Tezzeret is instantly set ablaze and spreads the fire to other zombies around it.

The zombies, of course, closed in upon me. I activated the outermost layer of my armor’s defensive screens, which I had devised with Baltrice’s help, as I find her solution to our zombie problem to be both elegant and efficient. Any zombies bold enough to actually attempt to touch me instantly burst into flame hot enough to set not only their whole bodies ablaze, but to spread to the others pressing in behind them.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

The armor also has multiple other layers of shields, although they are never described.

I stood in the middle of a rug that undoubtedly cost more than my father had earned in his entire life. I was still in my armor with all my shields working, excepting only the outmost, as it is an ungracious guest who sets his hostess's house on fire.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

This armor is so effective that (etherium heart) Silas Renn states that there are multiple time lines in which Tezzeret in this armor defeats Silas.

"The armor was a great idea," Renn said conversationally. "I've always admired your ingenuity. You'll never know how many time you beat me. I should say, timelines where you beat me."

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret turns Silas Renn's severed head into a device that allows him to use Silas Renn's unique magical powers of psychometry and clockworking. Here are some notable things from this passage.

• His head was in no danger of impact damage. So much so that Tezzeret could bounce his head like a ball and do no more damage than make him dizzy.
• Connecting threads of etherium to different parts of his brain give Tezzeret access to Silas Renns's entire perceptual system.
• Using this Tezzeret could perceive objects that were only potentially present, or items that were present in the past.
• He could also use Silas Renn to see sideways in time. Pretty much perceive alternate timelines and therefore perceive the consequences of any different choice or action.
• Renn's head would survive for a century or more.
• If Tezzeret felt like it he could rebuild Silas Renn into a man.

The telemin halo I’d fashioned out of Renn’s etheriumalloy body had turned out unexpectedly well. The external screening and impact cage was almost three feet in diameter; the bowed centering struts screwed into Renn’s skull had enough flex to provide effective shock absorption. I daresay within this halo, Renn was in no danger of impact damage; I could have bounced him like a rubber ball without doing more than making him dizzy. The six carry handles I had built onto the impact cage’s exterior projected far enough to prevent the halo from rolling on any surface less than a thirty-degree incline, and I certainly wouldn’t be placing Renn’s head on any slope steeper than that. He was too valuable.

A few more threads of pure etherium, similar to the one that kept him asleep, inserted into other parts of his brain allowed me to directly access his entire perceptual system—which was, I discovered, unexpectedly impressive. In addition to being able to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel what was in front of him, he could do the same with objects that were only potentially present, as well as objects that were long gone. Though as the interval increased, perception dimmed, it was still a useful talent.

Most interesting of all was his ability to see sideways in time. With the expenditure of considerable mana—easily done, given my current plenitude of etherium—he (and I, through him) could directly perceive the consequence of any given choice or string of choices, as the temporal streams bifurcated outward from each decision point. The more probable any given potential time line was, the easier it was to see.

It did not take much power at all to see time lines where Renn had won the fight.

I had decided not to tell Baltrice what would have happened to her if we’d lost. If she had so much as a hint, I could never have stopped her from killing Renn, and I was going to need him to navigate the Labyrinth.

Having left intact the magics that sustained his life and healed his injuries, I anticipated a virtually unlimited potential use-life for my Rennoscope (Rennscanner? Rennometer?). All his physical needs provided by the magics, he might well survive a century or more, which was far longer than I would need him.

Someday, perhaps, if I found myself in a sentimental mood, I might decide to rebuild him into a man. It was possible.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret uses his Rennometer to solve the Crystal Labyrinth

I sat on the sand of powdered glass in the center of the Labyrinth, my legs folded beneath me, and on my knees the head of Silas Renn.

I cannot say how long I sat there. Days, at least. Months? Years? There is no way to know. At some point, my injuries healed. I didn’t notice. The power I drew from the vast wealth of etherium at my command relieved me of any need to eat, drink, or eliminate, and it did so without requiring the intervention of my attention or any fraction of my consciousness at all. I needed all my consciousness for something else.

I was watching myself solve the Labyrinth.

By tapping into Renn’s temporal perception, I could trace the probability-ghosts of myself entering the Labyrinth, and once inside, my own knack for rhabdomancy enabled me to track them by the etherium they—I—carried. Will carry. Potentially. Every twist, every turn, every ascent, descent, or jump.

While I did so, I used a knack from my days at the Mechanists’ Guild to make my hands automatically pull from the etherium around me a series of thin wires, bending, twisting, and occasionally breaking each as I worked them into precise three-dimensional representations—models—of every path I saw myselves take. My long, long experience with precision ensured that these models would depict each path exactly. I had no need to model the Labyrinth itself; the paths were all that mattered.

I had built around myself a pair of rings, constructed so that the lower served as a base in the sand, while the upper could rotate freely along it. At twelve precise intervals around the movable ring, I had affixed a tall cross of etherium wire. The crux of each one marked the entryway of one of the great halls of the Labyrinth. The cross piece marked ground level. Each pin became the anchor for a worked-wire chart of all possible pathways branching from that entrance. By rotating the ring, I could bring any given hall before me without having to shift my own position.

For a maze, that would have sufficed; a three-dimensional solution for a three-dimensional problem. This, however, was a four-dimensional problem.

At least.

Because, after all, it only looked like a maze. It was a Labyrinth. It became a maze—a deadly one—for any who entered unprepared. I would not be one of these.

Preparation is my specialty.

As I worked, I discovered paths that could join two or more others that had seemed to lead to dead ends. Using a slightly thinner, shinier wire to connect magical transit points—where a path might leap from the top of one hall to the bottom of another—I began to join every hall to every other in multiply iterated pathways, nearly identical … but each and every one unique.…

The space around me was almost half full of the etherium web work when I discovered the pattern.

I could see it: a mathematical purity that words cannot describe, an elegance that transcended language.… I could predict, now, the shape and length of the next wire, and what points it would join. More than predict. See.

Know.

Soon I could see two wires ahead, then five, then a dozen.…

Then all of it.

I saw what my model would become. This wasn’t Renn’s power. It had nothing to do with time; this was form and function, stripped to the deep structure of matter itself. I saw the future not with prescience, but with experience. I knew where each strand must be placed and what each wire must connect, for the model to make sense.

“To make sense” is actually an expression for how I experience natural law.

That is: truth.

This experience—this knowing—flowed out from me, directing my hands to assemble the half-dreamed vision in my heart. The impossibly perfect structure of the etherium matrix enfolded me, enwrapped me, joined around and above me like the vault of a cathedral.

I had trained my entire life simply to see this. To do this. To make this.

To be this.

My hands stopped. My eyes froze open. I could not dream of moving. Could not dream of breathing. Could not imagine being anywhere but here.

Ever.

I saw without sight, heard without sound, smelled without scent, felt without touch. Kneeling within this heartbreakingly perfect sanctum that was the only possible answer to the question of my existence, I thought: What do you say without saying? And discovered the answer was obvious.

The joining of mechanics and time … is a clock.

Crucius …

The interpenetrating structure I had built around myself—the etherium model of the relational matrix of the twelve Halls around me—was perfect. Was inevitable. Was impossible.

Was context.

What makes a clock work is the engineering of its mechanics. What makes it beautiful is the elegance of its construction. What makes it perfect is the precision of its heart.

There is no heart more precise than mine. I had no need to find the center of the Crystal Labyrinth. I was the center.

I had become the hands of the clock.

What I said without saying was I am here.

And I was.

Forever.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret gives Baltrice a locket that can locate someone using just a small sample of their DNA.

I have two more gifts for you.” I pulled the navigator out of the same pocket. “It has a concealed catch—just here, do you see? Press it like this and the device opens.”

“It’s a locket.”

“It’s a navigator. Very much like your ring, actually. Single use, I’m afraid, but I think you’ll appreciate having it. If there is someone you need to find, for any reason, all you have to do is take something of them and secure it inside. Any sort of tissue sample will do—a drop of blood, a hair, even a fingernail paring. The navigator will show you where that person is and help you chart a path to him. Or her. It’s very effective, as long as your target is not using some rather advanced types of magical concealment. It works best on someone who doesn’t know you’re after them.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret boasts that he could craft a device that can do everything a human can do, with less than one thousandth the energy expenditure, and is self replicating for a thousand years.

“With less than one thousandth the energy expenditure that creating a fully functional human being requires,” Tezzeret went on, “I could design and build a device capable of everything a human can do, including creative problem solving, singing, writing poetry, whatever you like—not to mention creating its own replacements—and do it for a thousand years.”

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret uses the etherium of the island to encase himself in a full set of etherium armor.

Tezzeret extended his arms, and the sand beneath his feet poured upward along his legs, trunk, arms, and head until he was fully encased in shining etherium armor.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

This armor is so effective that Tezzeret barely even notices a construct of Nicol Bolas (which is from a different time line and undead) breathing fire on him, and then proceeds to one shot the dragon and make it explode.

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.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Another undead construct of Bolas from a different time line breaths fire on armored Tezzeret. The fire is so hot that the fringes of the attack eat through the pyromancer Batrice's defensive shields. Tezzeret takes the full blast for an extended period of time and his armor doesn't even look hot.

Then Tezzeret uses counter magic to negate the flames, and pushes Nicol Bolas to the ground. He then causes an explosion of flames from the ground so hot that it instantly turns the dragons head to ash. The same blast has no noticeable effect on armored Tezzeret.

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.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Then two of these Bolases appear and attack armored Tezzeret.

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.

-Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Tezzeret melts these two down to their skeletons but then four appear, and it appears that Tezzeret is starting to feel the pressure. But then eight more appear.

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

What was happening was the Nicol Bolas construct was using the power called clock working to reach into parallel timelines where he was dead and summoning his corpse to this time line as well as the necromancer Liliana Vess, and had her reanimate his dead body to fight Tezzeret.

Tezzeret keeps fighting these corpses until the construct Nicol Bolas starts to run out of bodies from different timelines to summon.

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

Tezzeret uses an artifact crossbow to kill a messenger from Nicol Bolas.

-Magic the Gathering: Dark Discoveries

Full Battles

Because of length issues this section is actually in a separate blog. If you wish to see the full fight scenes between Tezzeret and his most notable opponents click here.

Conclusion

Well that's everything. Tell me what you think of my first Magic the Gathering Respect Thread and tell me who you would like to see next. Also please share this around!

@jardinain2@themuser@lucano@the_imperator@noah_ouellette@jedixman@devil_driver@joewell911@staticspeedster@wollfmyth209

Tags to people who might be interested. If you aren't interested and don't want to be tagged in the future for threads similar to this, let me know and I apologize. If you know of other people who might be interested in being tagged from threads similar to this, PLEASE SHARE THIS THREAD AROUND.

Thank you all, and much love.

@banthabot: Ah hell yeah! ill give it a read the moment i have free time!

The first of many I hope?

@themuser: Indeed. Who would you like to see next? Chandra, Nissa, Sorin perhaps?

@banthabot: up to you, im just happy to see the hype!

@themuser: It'll be one of those three because they have less content to go through

@banthabot: Amazing what you put into here man. I'd like to see Chandra next. :D

Awesome.

@banthabot: Sorin would be my pick.

Oh, this is awesome! MTG characters deserve a lot more love on the battle forum, but their lore is so... isolated between different mediums that it's hard to get enough to make a proper debate. Feel free to tag me for any future ones you make.

As for what planeswalkers you might do next. My personal favorites are Kiora and Garruk (I'm a green player who dislikes elves). Kiora especially has some pretty insane water manipulation with that bident in the Battle for Zendikar.

I am sure you'll get to Nicol Bolas and Ugin eventually. Bolas' should be a fun read.

One mistake I see. In the first part where you discuss Etherium you wrote "Tezzeret is a powerful magic-rich alloy capable of holding enchantments." I think you meant Etherium.

@metaljimmor: thanks for the read!

I do intend to get Garruk and ,especially, Kiora TRs in the future.

And thanks for pointing out the mistake. I was typing abd reading about Etherium and Tezzeret so much that they started to flow together. I'll be sure to fix that

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