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For those interested, I've skimmed a few abstracts on the subject of magical suppression in elves. I don't really understand the fine details, but here's what I can glean:
Unworked iron (nicknamed "cold iron") is confirmed to have a disruptive effect on magical flow. It's not as strong as often claimed - those iron "anti-magic bracelets" that appeared a little while back claiming to protect the wearer from magic won't do shit, for example - but it definitely does work if put on the elf themselves. Particularly effective have been skin-tight iron anklets to disrupt gathering of mana from the ground, and skin-tight iron collars to disrupt the flow of mana between an elf's bodily reserves and her head. (Turns out the classic elf slave look is classic for a reason.)
The problem is that disrupting an elf's mana flow like this also seems to have a deleterious effect on their health. Just as starvation will suppress mana, so it seems that suppressing mana leads to a kind of starvation. They become listless, appetite disappears, some tissues waste, that sort of thing. When it was short-term suppression on prisoners, that was OK but it's a crap method to use on domestic elves.
The main problem is that we don't really understand it yet, but the new input from researchers' own elves seems to be accelerating things a lot now.
