Help me stat my villain?

[Heliomance]

Hello Playground!

Looking for help statting up a villain for my game. What I'm picturing is, essentially, Amon from Legend of Korra - the leader of a cult of personality dedicated to eradicating magic, who is himself a hypocrite using magic to achieve his goals. I was thinking maybe specialist Abjurer or something? The PCs are currently level 8, and mostly not optimisers, I need this guy to be an appropriate boss for the end of the story arc they're just about to start. Should be a long-lived race, he's been holding this grudge for an unspecified number of centuries.

Many thanks all!

[Anthrowhale]

Maybe something more sorcerer-like for the charisma? Or Beguiler for the skills?

[NotInventedHere]

Elan are ridiculously long-lived, but the -2 Charisma cuts into the 'charismatic cult leader' option a bit. A psion looking to eradicate magic and not really acknowledging the whole magic/psionics transparency thing might be interesting, but I'm not sure if it's quite what you're looking for?

[Quentinas]

MMh the brief description remember me a Suel arcanamanch from complete arcane, it could be adaptated to your situation, even if his spellcasting would not be so high as he is mainly a fighter rather than a spellcaster, so it could be the problem that . For the race I was thinking at
Killoren (or an adaptation of that race) with the magic that destroy the natural balance, and so each enemy of the nature and able to use magic should be hunter through the strenght of the weapons. You could smite 1/day that is based on charisma and not having problems of age
A necropolitan Hellbred (spirit) for a charisma bonus and ulterior motivation as he hate magics because is given by gods, and in his last life he was killed by a spellcaster? Bonus if he can use the connections he had to boost his organization
A midgard dwarf (frostburn) that as they hate the deities he hates the magic as a product of the deities so he want to kill every spellcaster (if you readapt the skills gained through hit dice you can enter the suel arcanamanch, he would have spell resistance and probably between 11 and 13 hit dice considering the cr that goes up from 5 as base+ 1 for each prestige class + eventual bonuses
Then we have to choose six levels that have full base attack for the suel arcanamach but now I don't have the energies to think about this)

[Heliomance]

Backstory of the campaign is that archmages discovering epic magic destabilised reality enough that Mechanus sent swarms of inevitables to scour magic from the world. This villain is someone who managed to live through the purge and wants to make sure it never happens again by ruthlessly expunging any trace of magic that pops up. However, as we all know, trying to fight magic without magic doesn't really work in D&D, so I'm just gonna fully lean into the "He's a complete hypocrite" angle

[Troacctid]

I would be looking at beguiler. They have dispels, Still and Silent as bonus feats, Diplomacy to rally followers, and Bluff and Sleight of Hand to disguise their magic. Throw in Deceptive Spell to frame other mages and you're in business.

[Feldar]

Hello Playground!

Looking for help statting up a villain for my game. What I'm picturing is, essentially, Amon from Legend of Korra - the leader of a cult of personality dedicated to eradicating magic, who is himself a hypocrite using magic to achieve his goals. I was thinking maybe specialist Abjurer or something? The PCs are currently level 8, and mostly not optimisers, I need this guy to be an appropriate boss for the end of the story arc they're just about to start. Should be a long-lived race, he's been holding this grudge for an unspecified number of centuries.

Many thanks all!

Don't get hung up on too many specifics. General notes are good, but in a long arc you'll want to be able to make adjustments to make adventures flow better. As an example, I once ran a villain who the party knew was a mage because he was casting arcane spells but they never knew specifics of his class and had to learn everything about him from deduction. This plot got us through two years of adventures, including the party making a dedicated effort to try to track down his origins. The party only learned of the wizard levels when they defeated him and captured his spellbook -- before that it was just conjecture on their part.

Also, the players never need to see the stat block and you don't have to answer all their questions about the villain along the way. "How did he live for 600 years?" is one of those things that could send the party off on their next quest...