But then, as stories were filled out, it turned out that these five had more in common with each other than initially thought. The imprisonment of the Eldrazi on Zendikar had taken place far, far earlier than we realised - at least a thousand years before the Brother's War - making Nahiri, if she still lived, significantly older than Freyalise and Teferi. Ob Nixilis is also rather ancient. By virtue of the fact that he must have fought Nahiri at sometime before she left Zendikar, he has to be an oldwalker as well.
Though we now have a lot of story involving the other four, we still know very little about Daretti. He is, of course, a goblin. He is from the High City of Paliano, on the plane of Fiora, the setting of the Conspiracy sets. He was a gifted artificer, employed at the Academy of Palino. Though he held high rank, many of the other artificers viewed him with disdain, possibly due to the fact that he was a sort of 'repurposer', building his cogwork contraptions out of scrap metal and broken artifacts.
One day, one of Daretti's cogwork devices exploded. This should have killed him, but it ignited his planeswalker spark, allowing him to planeswalk to relative safety. He was, however, severly wounded, and lost the use of his legs. He overcame this by building himself an elaborate clockwork rig that served as a self-propelled wheelchair.
Despite the disdain of those who thought recycling was uncivilised, Daretti was still a master artificer and a member of the Acadamy Board, and found many students that wished to learn from him. He was the mentor of both Sydri and Muzzio. Though Muzzio grew to be well-respected, Sydri dropping out of the academy to run a shop selling cogwork trinkets probably did Daretti few favours amongst the other artificers.
Daretti recently vanished without a trace. As the existence of planeswalkers is unknown to most people, it is widely believed that Muzzio killed him, in order to take his place on the Acadamy Board. It is far more likely that Daretti left Fiora and traveled to another plane for unknown reasons.
Despite being pretty, cool. Daretti's existence is odd. Flavourwise he shouldn't be of the same power level as the other commanderwalkers, but looking purely at the cards, he might actually be the most powerful of them.
The justification of the Mending, which depowered all planeswalkers, was supposedly to get them to a level that they could be cards. The Mending was widely disliked by those who cared about Magic's storyline, and the new planeswalkers were given derogatory names like 'Bradywalkers', and a few other names I do not wish to repeat.
Wizards were willing to take the knock from flavour-lovers in pursuit of the goal of making planeswalker cards. Which makes it strange that they would go and undermine this by making planeswalker cards supposedly representing oldwalkers from when they were actually still oldwalkers, as none of them can have anywhere near the power level they should. Nahiri imprisoned the Eldrazi. Teferi removed an entire continent from existence. Ob Nixilis exterminated all life on multiple planes.
Unless...the power lies not in what they can do, but in what format they can work. Back when it was called Elder Dragon Highlander, the idea was of a group of planeswalkers (the players) getting together and having a huge all-out brawl. Similar perhaps, to what happened at the summit of the Null Moon. Planeswalkers were never really supposed to get along (sorry Oath of the Gatewatch).
What if the 'commander clause' takes a planeswalker from the 60-card limited-to-a-specific-pool-of-spells two-player Standard Format and elevates them into the 100-card any-spell-in-history mutiplayer-brawl Commander Format? That is a rather significant boost in power - to the point that we have to be careful in Commander not to break the game too much. It is also a lot more like the old idea of what players would be like as planeswalkers slinging spells at each other, and the old days of first edition, when you played singleton power cards cause that was what you had.
Back to Daretti. If we say the commander clause represents the power of the oldwalkers, then Daretti must be one. And...what if he was? We don't know how old he actually is. We don't know when the explosion that cost him his legs was. We don't even know how old Paliano is We know the Custodi priesthood extended Brago's life by centuries. The fact that another person was also effectively immortal wouldn't surprise people too much - people might even regard them with disdain, as the Custodi priests were never very well liked.
It's just a theory. But it's one I am really fond of.
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