I see a lot of players prepared the Fireball Magnet in their slot #4. I guess the reasoning was, if you do not fancy either of the alternatives (both were altars), it's still at least slightly better than just leaving the prep slot open.
My run was fairly standard with a JJ (Petition, 3x Boost Mana) -> Mystera (Refreshment, 3x Magic) -> JJ (Chaos Avatar) swap; I didn't pull any stunts, just went with my standard leveling scheme (4-5-7-8-10), so I could pick up a Prestige 1 Chaos Avatar for a net 350 XP. (Coincidentally topped Piety but I'm not sure how, and I'm sure not for long...

). Thanks probably to Elite Items prep, I saw Zot in the shop pool and went with it, with hindsight buying it was probably an OK idea, but firing it off was a pretty bad idea, considering how late I ended up finding the bosses (both were in a corner - different one, of course) even despite the Orb kind of also revealing the monster locations. Built up for a PISORF chain, though JJ's weakness stacks really hurt early knockback damage; so it might be a good idea to consider an early desecration for this.
Fun fact of the day: if you desecrate Dracul with less than 20 health, his penalty will simply reduce max health to 1. So if you do the desecration at Level 1, without having picked up any Health Boosters, you only lose 9 health. Use with caution though, because this means that unless you pick up some +Health afterwards, you'll be unable to melee any monster of your level for the first couple of levels.
"Thinker", just without the "ache".