Yes, in this game I did buy one council room and it clearly helped. WM + Herald seems cute, but I don't really see why I would need that, Sage already do a good job at discarding the junk. Buying them seems just like a waste of time. In this game I bought one WM for +action and it was already enough (it's a very fast game that lasted 13 turns, I don't think I needed to build more, unless a very good megaturn could beat those 5 provinces by turn 13)