In my experience trasher-Cultist often beats Cultist first.
When you have villages, or when the trashing is really fast such as Chapel or Count, or when the trashing is non-terminal and you don't have to buy too many copies of it. If you go for Mercenary and Cultist on this board, you'll end up drawing the other dead very often.
Now that I think of it, Library/BM has got to beat everything here. It beats Ruins, it beats discard attacks, it doesn't enable Beggar/Feodum. Well, except it's still worse than Journeyman/BM, but it's not that much worse, and you can still get a Journeyman as your second +card if your opponent has gone Journeyman/BM.