Pili-Pala Modern (Budget) (Modern)

So I'm not really a big fan of transmuting. You basically need to take a turn off to get the card in your hand and then you're playing it a turn behind schedule anyway. Cheap cantrips, like Opt and Serum Visions, will help you smooth your draws early so that you can more reliably get your combo together by turn 3 or 4. I added in some counter magic in the form of Swan Song (with Into the Roil or Vapor Snag backup so the tokens really don't matter).

The black you had in your original list was basically just there for Perplex and Diabolic Tutor (both of which I think are pretty bad in modern right now; Perplex is awkward since you can only transmute as a sorcery, so you need to decide to keep it up as a counter spell or transmute it before your opponent casts anything threatening, and diabolic tutor is way to slow to be very useful).

The rest of the deck is as you built it so that shouldn't need explaining.

At the moment the sideboard is up in the air, but I added some graveyard hate since a huge percentage of the current meta uses the graveyard in some way or another. I'd like to get some artifact removal in there as well, because cards like Pithing Needle really shut this deck down (it names Grand Architect and suddenly Pili-Pala can't be blue anymore; unless you can go infinite in response).

Anyway, yeah that's sort of what I came up with for a budget list. If you want some better card draw, Ancestral Vision is really good in a vacuum (but you'll have to wait until turn 5 to get anything out of it which may be too slow... maybe a 1 or 2 of in the sideboard).