You can't argue against 5Prov/12 turns with no +buy on the board and no gain beside Treasures.
T4 Mint of course totally fits to your strategy, but Steward is strong trashing, too. And Bottingham does not have such a different strategy, he also goes for the small, almost treasureless deck and a Poor House. He just has some more turns of buying Caravans because he can't start buying Provinces that early.
I guess FV>WM here was the right call, both filter Victories, but FV does it now and the Minstrel for the next turn, and as this is so close. Also, the FV is guaranteed to either find Steward, Caravan or Poor House if you don't have both PHs in your hand. Caravan is only in the deck half of the time, so while it seems that you need a 3 card collision, you only need to collide two cards (FV and 1 out of two Poor Houses), and you than have a quite good chance to find the missing PH if it's not in your hand already. Don't want to calculate the odds, but the deck is quite small, you certainly had some luck that this works every hand (not that it probably will break down T13 (you would draw one card from Caravan that could rescue you)), but I would not be too surprised if the chance is somewhere at 20-30% that this will actually work 5 times in a row with this deck:
You start with 5 cards in T8, so T8 is guaranteed to work, T9 and T10 also because you have 2 cantrips. So the only risk is in 11 and 12, and you still have Caravan which draws cards, and FV which skips Provinces. Edit: After this analysis, my bet is on odds >30%...
Edit: T10 is not guaranteed, you could draw 2xProv2xPH1xSteward, but the odds of this is 1/21. That's wrong, you had a Caravan from last turn, giving you a 6 card hand in a 6 card deck (excluding Caravan).
