There is no card, no character, no creature more influential to Magic: the Gathering than Nicol Bolas. A bold statement, for sure, but one I am willing to stand behind. To begin, we must go back to the very early days of Magic, to 1993.

Magic was a breakout success. It is difficult to grasp in a modern world with social media and instant communication exactly how impressive Magic’s viral success was, but it was nothing short of a phenomenon - selling out instantly wherever it landed and leaving players clamouring for more.

It fell to the fledgling company of Wizards of the Coast to provide those players with more, and to design enough cards and put out enough product to keep people excited (as well as making sure there was enough out there to meet demand). It was obvious that it couldn’t all be left on one man’s shoulders. Other people – outsiders – were needed to make Magic cards.

Peter Atkinson (Wizards’ CEO and overall boss of Magic) stretched out his hands to his friends. Peter had built his company because of his love of Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general, so who better to go to than his old D&D companions? Those friends sat together and designed a set which encompassed that shared passion, a set based around their many years of Dungeons and Dragons games: Legends.

Legends was the first large Magic expansion. It had 310 cards, more than three times that of previous expansions, Antiquities and Arabian Nights, and introduced the world to multicoloured ‘gold’ cards – an instant hit. Each of those gold cards was a legendary creature, unique to the world (and the battlefield), and each legendary creature was gold. Five of those were dragons.

The Legendary Elder Dragons: Arcades Sabboth, Chromium, Vaevictis Asmadi, Palladia-Mors and, of course, Nicol Bolas.

Look at him here, does his pose not strike terror into your very heart?

It is true – the card art for the most powerful creature ever printed (at the time) was a little lacklustre. Nicol Bolas, Librarian might not have been written on the name line, but it could have been. Is this art which shows a 7/7 flying terror, capable of ripping the thoughts right from your head with a mere touch?

Although he is a master of disguise – was this bookish form merely a disarming illusion?

Sometime later he was reprinted with a little more pizzazz:

Let us forgive the early bookworm, and pretend to ourselves that he has always been depicted as a gigantic being of power, pulsing with mystical energy and demanding subservience.

Nicol Bolas was one of the most sought-after cards from the set, and a year later was the centrepiece to the first catch-em-up reprint set, Chronicles. Some years ago, in another place, I wrote an entire article on how well that went – feel free to jump though the tangle of the internet and have a read. Suffice to say, reprinting Nicol Bolas in the way that they did had repercussions which still sting today.

Legends was a set without a storyline. Unlike its predecessor, Antiquities, the designers had not come to the table with a real focus on cohesive lore – merely a selection of fun ideas to play with in a Magic duel. There were a few stories that were intended by the set’s creators, some of which couldn’t make it on to the cards due to space constraints but were told in later years.

The Dragons’ War

Many thousands of years ago, the dragons – then creatures of near limitless ability - had a war of such power and intensity that it ripped at the very fabric of existence. Not much is known about this war or the mighty beings that participated in it, except that the victors were a family of dragons that became known as Elder Dragons. The losers were cast down, becoming wurms or other lesser species, unable to regain their former majesty.

Of the dragons to survive the war, seven are known, though only five use the affectation of Elder: Arcades Sabboth, Nicol Bolas, Rhuell the Chromium Dragon, Palladia-Mors and their cousin Vaevictis Asmadi. The two colourless dragons - Piru, companion to Rhuell, and Ugin the Spirit Dragon - come from the time of the Dragons War but have never claimed the title.

Of them all, the most powerful was always Nicol Bolas. The Elder Dragon whose touch shattered minds became a planeswalker in the final days of the Dragons’ War and shifted to Dominaria to make the plane his home.

Showing the effect of the Dragons’ War, the original flavour text submitted but not used for Elder Land Wurm was: Once there were multitudes of Elder Dragons in Dominia. After the Great War of the dragons, many were beaten to the ground, stripped of their title, never to fly again.

The Flavour of Bolas

Making the five Elder Dragons was a mechanical choice. Though it is commonplace to design a cycle of cards in modern Magic (a set of cards with similar abilities, usually one for each colour), the Elder Dragons cycle marked the first creature cycle ever (Alpha only had non-creature cycles). Each of the Elder Dragons was a 7/7 flyer with an extra ability, and it was the extra text on Nicol Bolas that held him head and shoulders above his siblings.

Where Vaevictis Asmadi had an expanded version of firebreathing, and Palladia-Mors had trample, Nicol Bolas’ ability was to force the opponent to discard his or her entire hand every time they were hit. There was no comparison to the others either in game power, or evocative imagery - really, the other Elder Dragons never stood a chance to become the players’ favourite.

The ability of ‘discard your hand’ had never been seen on a card before, and became Nicol Bolas’ signature. Years later, in 2006’s Dissension, Wit’s End was printed utilising the same mechanic. Though the flavour of the card as part of the Dimir guild prevented a Nicol Bolas tie-in at the time, as soon as it was reprinted in Magic 2013 the creative team did what was right and linked the card in art and flavour text to the master of discard. Here was Bolas, standing immense over the puny figure of a lesser planeswalker, toying with him as the dragon’s overwhelming power reduces the chance of victory to nothing. It’s all very well being a dimension-jumping archmage, but there’s little you can do if you have had your mind wiped from a single touch.

(As a side note, no one knows which planeswalker is depicted in the art for Wit’s End. Some believe it to be Teferi (bald planeswalker known to have fought Bolas) but the clothes and axe don’t fit the character; others argue for Sarkhan Vol, but the hair is a tough sell here. Chances are that it is merely some unknown and unnamed planeswalker from the artist’s imagination.)

Of all the Elder Dragons, it had to be Nicol Bolas who transformed to a planeswalker following the Dragons’ War. Here was everything Magic needed in a bad guy character – a dragon, which by itself drips with resonance for fantasy-lovers; a powerful sought-after card from the very early days of Magic; a unique and devastating ability and artwork which knocked it all out of the park... OK, so three out of four wasn’t bad.

Whether you consider Bolas to be a scourge on the multiverse who should be vanquished, or are one of those always rooting for him, there is little doubt that the most powerful of characters has spent considerable time as the focus of your personal Magic story.

Coming to Madara and The Leviathan

Dominaria has a rich and varied landscape. Nestled in the Jamuuran Sea lies the islands of the Madaran Empire, and northernmost, the key island of Madara itself.

Coming to Dominaria with such power, Nicol Bolas found that he needed to anchor himself to the plane lest his very presence destroy the world. Attuned to black, red and blue magic, the Elder Dragon settled in the Empire of Madara which itself was a focus point and leyline crossing for the three colours.

It was here, relatively early during his life on Dominaria as time is measured by an immortal dragon, that Nicol Bolas was a participant in what is regarded as the very first planeswalker battle.

Little is known of the conflict between Bolas and the demonic sea being known only as The Leviathan. With no witnesses left alive bar the dragon planeswalker himself, and his retelling of the tale considered far from objective, much is left to speculation. What is believed is that the fight between the Elder Dragon and The Leviathan lasted a full month and the devastation that the battle wrought diminished the land of Madara such that it shrank by a third of its original size. It is also believed that this combat created the first of the temporal rifts which centuries later would come to threaten the very existence of the multiverse and trigger the event known as The Mending.

Nicol Bolas was triumphant. Relishing his victory, the Elder Dragon feasted on the remains of his opponent, spending a full year on devouring the corpse and the well of blue mana that it contained. What remained at the end of this time was little more than two protruding ribs, rising out of the sea as a monument to his superiority. That edifice still resides there in Madara, known to all as the Talon Gates:

The Imagery of Nicol Bolas

In making a super-villain, Wizards of the Coast were quick to eschew the early Edward Beard Jr. picture of the meek librarian and reimagined Nicol Bolas as the awe-inspiring dragon that we have come to admire. Understanding the need for iconic touches to Nicol Bolas’ form, the redesign of the dragon came with two well-defined features which stood him out from the crowd.

The first is size. Bolas is huge - to present him as superior in every way than a lesser dragon, effort has often been made to show Nicol Bolas interacting with other creatures or scenery to depict scale.

The second are his signature horns. In giving his horns a bold and definite shape without diverting too much from the original art, the creative team have made the oldest planeswalker visually identifiable in any context with any lighting. A mere glimpse of the top of his head and recognition is immediate. But where does the shape come from? Need we look any further than the site of his first personal victory?

Master of Machinations

Before The Mending, planeswalkers had many powers which made them a great force. A lot of focus is placed on the immortality and agelessness of pre-mending planeswalkers, but another of their innate abilities was that of shapeshifting, allowing them to move unnoticed across the multiverse.

Despite all his full-on power, Nicol Bolas likes to work behind the scenes, getting others to do his dirty work and manipulating the weak to his ends. Whether this is because he fears exposure, or whether he just finds it enjoyable to play the puppet master is unknown, but often storylines develop to reveal his sticky claws in the background.

The first showing of this comes in Madara as, after taking control of the land from a self-styled god-empress (who comes up short when meeting someone who really does have the power of a god, and the ambition to use it), Nicol Bolas settles himself in as the human Emperor of the region.

Next Time

A being of such immense majesty as Nicol Bolas, however, demands proper attention is given to the retelling of his history and it will not be contained in a single article. Next time we will continue here, with the story of Bolas’ reign in Madara.

Catch Up