Double Doran's Rings instead of any mana item.

With the nerf to and price increase for , I find that rushing these two items are absolutely dragging your power strike back. While stays a decent mana sustaining item, it offers no early power for you to out trade your opponent, forcing you to aim farming or hope for a gank, otherwise you wouldn't get the chance to snowball as soon as possible.

I suggest building instead. Each one offers solid mana regeneration, which is much more useful than percentage mana regeneration before Lv9, where starts regenerating more than . Two of them is enough for sustaining mana, especially if the champ excels at wave clearing at a low mana cost such as , because the least mana you spend on killing minions, the more mana you get from doran's ring passive. The advantages are:

1. You enjoy faster mana regeneration, more than grail and morello.
2. You get the early AP for trading.
3. You get more AP for easier wave-clearing, which gives you more gold and ganking space.
4. Jump straight to power strike with since you don't have to worry about mana itemization.

The downside, however, is you don't get CDR until mid game, so utility mages with long cooldown such as actually don't work. That's why they are fucked up when are fucked up. They are desperate for CDR items. The best build I can think of for them are + two . For poke and burst oriented mages such as , they don't need much CDR anyway. These champions better stay away from early, they would only drag their back.

In addition, I read an article somewhere on board with detailed calculation comparing with . is only more useful after Lv9, which means the only reason for building it early is for the MR(which was nerfed from 45 to 25 before), while morello is now too expensive to consider building early.

I have had a lot of success by building double and then straight to in platium ranked games.

Some good points in comments:

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The 20% CDR itself can be considered a huge boon, but the mana regeneration of morellonomicon scales with your base regeneration, which means at lower levels its actually quite bad. Combine this CDR with lower base levels of regeneration, and you'll actually be going oom faster with a morellonomicon than you would with 2 doran rings and a needlessly large rod.

There is still merit to rushing a rod on many occasions. Early on the dorans will give you equal or better regeneration than a morello due to their CSing passive. Furthermore, your mana is more efficient with a needlessly large rod than it is with morellonomicon parts due to the increased AP. So you're hitting harder, albeit less frequently, but you have similar regeneration meaning you can sustain your damage more easily resulting in more damage output over longer periods of time. It requires a difference in playstyles to take advantage of this, since with CDR you would want to engage in sustained battles while without the CDR you would want to disengage after using your abilities.

The last thing you should consider is the difficulty in accessing a needlessly large rod. If you back with 2000 gold, it's better to buy the rod+dorans because of opportunity cost. It's easy to fill in the pieces of a morellonomicon whenever you back with small amounts of gold, but backing with 1600+ gold is relatively uncommon and therefore you should take advantage of the opportunity when you have it.