I do not like Goblin Electromancer: I don't like the engine for my combo deck dying to creature removal.

There was a thread on MTGS for ages talking about a deck called "ritual gifts". Touted as a "combo control deck" It played 6-8 Pyretic Rituals along with seething song and a handful of removal and counterspells. The combo involved using Gifts to find seething song, past in flames, and increasing vengeance. Depending on what you ended up getting (and with quite a bit of initial mana) you could flashback and copy these spells to generate like 15 mana with seething song at which point it was academic to just flashback your gifts as well and durdle until you could grapeshot them for 20.

The problem was that you needed so much initial starting mana to get this going that it needed to play a lot of the 2-mana rituals, which are not very good. This cut down on a lot of the room for a 'control package', supposedly one of the incentives to play the deck. With the seething song ban as well, if you want to use a similar increasing vengeance combo you need even more starting mana (and another colour) in order to go off with Channel the Suns (the only other spell in modern that adds 5+ mana to your pool reliably).

In comes the 1 mana artifact from TSP: Locket of Yesterdays, which makes spells you cast cost 1 less for each card with the same name in your graveyard. This is almost an Electromancer. If you have nothing in grave, it's worse, because obviously it does nothing. If you have 1 copy, its effect is the same, and anything more than that makes it better than electromancer (as long as you have spells with 2+ colourless mana in the cost). It doesn't die to lightning bolt and it only costs one mana, so if it's going to be reducing the cost of something you can effectively cast it for 0 during the combo turn. Unfortunately it can still be abrupt decayed but I guess I can't have everything.

Just like Electromancer, Locket can be used with Manamorphose to create overpowered cantripping rituals. Locket is also great with gifts because gifts lets you put a variety of cards in the graveyard to power up the cost-reducing ability. Gifts has 3 colourless mana in the cost, allowing for a large reduction in the case of a multiple-locket draw or chaining gifts together. Channel the suns becomes absurd with locket too. 1 Locket stack lets you have your seething song (a banned card) and 2 locket stacks is a thresholded cabal ritual. If you somehow hit 3 you get a '4th' rite of flame. If you do the tricks with increasing vengeance it's easy to make a crapton of mana and again, winning is academic with gifts and PiF. Locket also reduces the cost when casting spells via flashback (although it doesn't count the spell itself that is being cast).


4 Scalding Tarn
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Steam Vents
1 Breeding Pool
1 Stomping Ground
2 Island
2 Mountain
1 Forest
3 Sulfur Falls
1 Desolate Lighthouse

4 Manamorphose
3 Merchant Scroll
1 Grapeshot
2 Past in Flames
4 Remand
2 Izzet Charm
1 Steam Augury
2 Increasing Vengeance
1 Electrolyze
1 Pact of Negation
1 Pyroclasm
4 Rune Snag
4 Locket of Yesterdays
4 Gifts Ungiven
4 Channel the Suns

The above is a sample decklist. Merchant Scroll is useful for finding gifts but it can also get pieces of disruption. Izzet Charm is a good all-round card, providing solid disruption and the looting ability has strong synergy with the combo endgame. Remands delay the opponent and are also useful during the combo turn for protecting the combo, cantripping and bouncing grapeshot.

The second increasing vengeance should probably be cut for a piece of cheap removal (even like a lightning bolt). Maindeck pact is probably not needed either. I'm not sure if Rune Snag is correct over mana leak, or something else entirely. Rewind does interesting things with Locket but that's probably just going way too deep.

Let me know what you think. The strategy probably isn't even viable with so much scooze and deathrite everywhere