The OP lists in this thread are more focused on accelerating out the RiP+Helm combo in a semi-casual way. What Laser and I have built here is a bit different from that. It's more UW control with a combo finish (control-combo). Helm is just a compact noncreature "I Win" button taking up little deck space, that you can tutor or dig for when you're ready to finish.
This is my take on the deck and my motivations behind building it, but Laser may have other opinions as a player with more Parfait background.
Fundamentally this is a tap-out UW control based on proactive permanents instead of a reactive spells. UW control has been a dominant force in Magic for a long time, combining blue to control the stack and white to control the board. UW control can be either reactive (draw-go, holding up instant-speed answers) or proactive (tapping out to play permanents that establish control). This is a proactive version. The permanents assemble to form some useful combos that threaten to provide massive virtual card advantage if they stick. This forces the opponent to fight over your enchantments under the threat that you'll just take over the game otherwise. Because the permanents are artifacts and enchantments, you're exploiting the fact that most Legacy decks run very few answers to resolved enchantments. We proactively spam out more things than they can answer, protect them with counters, then use those engines to run away with the game. Once you've got the game locked up, Helm is an elegant 1-card "I win" button.
Reeplcheep's Curse Stompy decks fights the current meta along a similar angle: maindeck gravehate, proactive permanent-based prison, then playing a 1-card "I win" like Curse or Helm.
2-card Combos
Rest in Peace +
Energy Field: You can't take damage (although you can take life loss). RiP exiling cards turns off Energy Field's usual self-destruct. This combo makes most board states and win conditions completely irrelevant, forcing the opponent to divert from their game plan to answering this so they can actually do things. RiP also hates out a lot of GY-based value engines that are common right now.
Rest in Peace +
Web of Inertia: A slight variation on RiP+Field, this one means your opponent can't turn creatures sideways (but does let you take other sources of damage, e.g.
Lightning Bolt). Web is useful to stop "attacks" triggers on creatures like
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath and
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Because this is more of a corner case, we only run 1 Web and in the SB. Most of the time Energy Field is better.
Rest in Peace +
Helm of Obedience: With RiP out, Helm basically reads "5: Win the game". You want to get RiP out early for the other combos and for general grave hate. Then, when you're ready, you can go "5: Win the game". Ideally you want to get control first and have counters in hand to protect the combo, but you can goldfish out the combo if they're Hellbent. ETutor finds this at EOT or Upkeep for 1 mana so you can pull this out of nowhere pretty quickly.
Land Tax +
Scroll Rack: If you have fewer lands in play than the opponent, Land Tax has "0: Put 3 lands in your hand. Shuffle". 1 mana to draw 3 cards is good, even better if it's repeatable. The drawback is that these cards are lands. Extra lands are usually redundant, and then you run out of lands in the deck and can't keep repeating. But
Scroll Rack lets you put those 3 lands (and any other unwanted cards) back to draw fresh cards. Combined you're paying 1 mana to just draw 3 free random cards each turn. The lands go back to your library so Land Tax can find the same 3 lands again next turn, and Scroll Rack can convert them into 3 new cards again. Unchallenged this threatens to give you overwhelming card advantage in the late game and just bury the opponent. UW control drawing this many free cards is too much for most decks to handle.
Counterbalance +
Scroll Rack: Similar to
Counterbalance +
Sensei's Divining Top, being able to pay 1 colorless mana to change the top card of your library at instant speed allows you to essentially have a repeatable "1, T: counter target spell". Counterbalance is a dumb card that completely dominates the stack. Unchallenged, this is insane virtual card advantage by nullifying (or threatening to nullify) most cards in the opponent's hand because they will just get countered over and over again without you expending any cards yourself.
Why are we playing these separate combos together?
UW
Counterbalance Miracles was Tier 1 in Legacy for a long time. Counterbalance is such a busted card. The
Sensei's Divining Top ban put a stop to that. Since Top's banning, UW Miracles was still strong but the Counterbalance lock wasn't nearly as busted because it was harder to sustain and easier to get through, and Counterbalance was what really pushed that deck over the top.
Scroll Rack isn't as good as Top but can still set up many of the same shenanigans by manipulating Counterbalance, putting Miracles on top of your library, as well as drawing free cards with Land Tax.
Note that you can activate Scroll Rack in response to an enemy spell and put back 4 cards (3 lands + 1 other card on top), both setting up Counterbalance and drawing free cards from Land Tax. It doesn't have to be either-or. You can do both at once. With proper stack control and sequencing these two combos fit together well, enabling stack control and card advantage. Both can be good in winning the late game.
So why hasn't CounterRack Miracles taken off in Legacy? Scroll Rack is slower, more vulnerable, and more durdly than Top. Legacy is a tempo format, so it risks losses to fast decks. That's where I think the Energy Field + Rest in Peace combo complements it well. RiP/Field gives us tools to stop pressure from fast decks, while Counter/Rack and Tax/Rack give us tools to fight spell-based strategies, protect Rip/Field prison, and establish late game dominance. They fit together well. Rip/Field protects us while we set up other durdlier things, and the durdlier things protect Rip/Field as the game stalls out. We don't need to CB everything, as long as we can protect our prison and their Decays are torn between answering RiP/Field and answering CB. Sometimes the potential threat of each combo is enough.
All of this is tied together by extremely powerful and efficient card selection (4 Brainstorm, 4 Ponder, 3 ETutor, Scroll Rack) to let you assemble the pieces you need when you need them. Because you are tapping out to play permanents, free counters (6xForce) play a big role in both protecting your pieces and stopping opponent's early noncreature plays, especially vs combo and prison decks.
Playing the deck
Like any control deck, the play pattern will come down to guessing what your opponent is on and then choosing the lane to stop their plan, using card selection tools to sculpt your hand in that direction.
Against an aggro player you want to jam Rip+Field as fast as possible and then protect it with counters. That will prevent them from winning, and then eventually you can pull ahead in cards and set up a win condition.
Against a control player, you want to jam Counterbalance or Tax-Rack, establish hand dominance, and then you'll be able to stick Helm having more protection than they have answers.
Against a combo player you use control pieces to fight their combo and Counterbalance should eventually win the stack if they try for a second wind.
This deck gets free edges against graveyard combos and graveyard engines by having maindeck graveyard hate. Lately the format has been full of control decks using graveyard value engines (Uro, Loam, Snapcaster, DHA before it was banned) so playing control on a different axis (enchantments instead of GY) both dodges the hate for those decks and hates out their engines.
Why this over traditional UW control
Reactive 1-for-1 control loses to 2-for-1 control. Lately UGx and UBx control have been full of proactive 2-for-1 tools (Uro, Ice-Fang, Field of the Dead, Oko, Dreadhorde, Baleful Strix, Snapcaster-Hymn, Liliana). A reactive strategy (removal + counters) is going to run out of answers against strategies like that. Even when you answer it, they're ahead in cards, so eventually you run out of answers and they win. Instead of fighting the uphill battle of trying to answer each threat in a game where creatures are increasingly harder to answer, we set up our own proactive prison. Our prisons can represent 6-for-1s or better if they stick. Maindeck graveyard hate also weakens popular engines like Uro.
I originally brewed this when Oko/Uro was the dominant control deck. Enchantment-based proactive control with maindeck GY hate punked everything those decks were trying to do, which seemed like a more winning strategy than trying to react to a resolved Oko. But since Oko's ban we get back the power of Scroll Rack (with both CB and Land Tax), which open up other ways to establish degenerate lategame dominance. And we still hate out Uro.
I'm not claiming this is better than Miracles, but I think it's a fun deck that can attack the meta along different angles and pull out a lot of wins from the sheer power of these combos.
My current list looks like this. I think Laser Brains is right that stable mana is more important in this meta than the red splash for minor SB value (REB).
//Lands: 19
4
Flooded Strand4
Prismatic Vista2
Tundra5
Snow-Covered Island3
Snow-Covered Plains1
Karakas//Enchantments and Artifacts: 18
2
Land Tax4
Rest in Peace3
Energy Field3
Counterbalance3
Scroll Rack1
Detention Sphere1
Court of Cunning1
Helm of Obedience//Spells: 23
4
Force of Will4
Brainstorm4
Ponder4
Swords to Plowshares3
Enlightened Tutor2
Force of Negation2
Terminus//Sideboard: 15
1
Helm of Obedience1
Web of Inertia1
Back to Basics1
Engineered Explosives1
Leyline of Sanctity1
Deafening Silence1
Pithing Needle2
Detention Sphere2
Spell Pierce1
Flusterstorm1
Dovin's Veto1
Narset, Parter of Veils1
Hall of Heliod's Generosity
Using Enlightened Tutor effectively
I think ETutor is one of the most slept-on cards in Legacy and love playing with it.
Vampiric Tutor and
Mystical Tutor have been banned since the early days of the format for good reason. The ability to spend 1 mana at instant speed to access a wide range of powerful cards in your deck is very strong, even if it's card disadvantage. Most people who dismiss this card focus on the card disadvantage aspect. The key thing is that you don't spend ETutor to find a 1-for-1 answer or fair threat. ETutor for 1-for-1s will leave you with card disadvantage and losing at Magic. Even tutoring for a 2-for-1 is questionable play, because it will net out to card-neutral except you were committed to a specific sequence of cards just to get back to card parity.
The way to abuse ETutor is to look for combo wins and 6-for-1s. This deck is full of enchantment-artifact combos that threaten to provide insane virtual card advantage. Energy Field lock nullifies every creature on their board, in their hand, and in their deck. It's an even bigger card swing than a board wipe (which just answers the creatures on board). Counterbalance lock nullifies entire hands and draw steps. Land Tax + Scroll Rack draws 3 cards per turn. Helm reads "5: Win the game". These are things worth risking card disadvantage for, especially if you can assemble them and protect them with very little tempo cost (1 mana instant speed card selection + free counters).
The SB contains an ETutor package following that theme.
Back to Basics can nullify whole manabases.
Leyline of Sanctity proactively cancels discard, burn, and targeted combos.
Deafening Silence hoses whole deck archetypes.
Web of Inertia creates a lock similar to Energy Field.
Engineered Explosives can be used to answer a single problem permanent if you really need it, but it can also wipe multiple things. We don't want cards like
Seal of Cleansing because ETutoring for a 1-for-1 is a bad play.
Detention Sphere is a better spot removal to lean on because at least it can potentially remove multiple things, it gets through both Chalice @ 1 and Chalice @ 2, it fills the 3 cmc gap on the CB curve.
2nd Helm is a backup win condition. In G2 they are more likely to play to fight over Helm, so it can help to have a 2nd in grindy matchups in case you miscalculated and lost the fight over the first one.
Court of Cunning is a maindeck backup win condition that can be useful to win through hate like Pithing Needle, Karn, Teeg, Ouphe, etc. Court also draws you cards, pitches to Force, and fills the 3 spot on the CB curve.