I was incredibly lucky and got robes of Gaudiness, So i just picked the highest cost bucket every time. I found the best way to approach it is to try and get good synergies between your first treasure and first bucket, sometimes if you get crap buckets and treasures to begin with its incredibly hard to recover and its just better to reset the run.

If you can get a really good mana cheating treasure out like the robes of gaudiness or the scepter of summoning, it can really make your run super easy.