Sorry I poofed, I've been pretty busy (and also haven't really been considering speedrunning, considering that I don't really have the funds for streaming equipment).

I never thought about mission avoidance before, but now I gotta try it! That's an awesome find!

I'll enter a few thoughts on strategy (but seriously you're awesome for already working on the routing Celestics).

1. As far as the missions go in Lively Town, even if I stick to almost exclusively the shortest missions throughout the game and don't even complete the dungeon in my casual playthroughs, I'm generally able to get the rank up before Fire Island so it shouldn't be necessary to complete any dungeons entirely. Just do the missions.

2. My strategy has included blast seeds for the following fights: Salamence, first phase Entei, second phase Dark Matter. I've never used Wondermail, but between dungeon drops and Kecleon I usually have around 3 for Salemence (which is about enough to defeat him by themselves), and then after using those 3 I'll have about 6-8 when I get to Fire Island (and I really only need 3 for Entei). If I wanted to, I could use a couple more blast seeds on Magmortar as well, but otherwise I'm saving for DM Phase 2.

(Short note on seeds: Try to find ONE ban seed during the run. You will use it on Yveltal when he uses Oblivion Wing).

3. I think there are a few Pokemon that would be good for partner (I've personally been using Totodile, and there are places where Totodile comes in handy big time). However, Charmander appears to be, by far, the best main Pokemon in general, and especially for the speed run, as its Dragon Rage is entirely boss for the first several chapters.

4. I haven't used orbs. I find that I don't really need them, and not having them in my bag gives me room for other important items (my bags are usually filled with elixirs, berries, and seeds almost exclusively).

5. I don't usually use a lot of wands, either, but I hoard Petrify, Confuse, Warp, and Stayaway (and I think one other but I forget the name off the top of my head). I find these more useful than orbs because they take up much less space in your bag. As for when I use them... you can make arguments for either the Tree of Life or Road to Primeval Forest in Any%. In Epilogue%, you have two long dungeons where you're solo, and I can't really get through those two dungeons without the aforementioned wands, so I save them all for those two dungeons.

Yeah, I'm thinking about developing strats for this, though the 3ds capture card is gonna be a huge pain.

I feel like that, unless we get a huge community, we should focus mostly on Any% and Epilogue%.

IMO I'd say no WM codes. RNG is something you have to deal with in any game, and even in speedrunning you can't minimize its effects. IMO, with good enough sheer knowledge and strats, you can overcome item drop RNG and whatnot so WM isn't truly necessary.

I think the next time I do a playthrough (probably not too long after AGDQ ends) I'm going to start taking notes specifically on the missions, to see what each one unlocks in turn, and then plot out which combination of missions results in the least amount of average time over a run (which is mostly a lot of attention to both the number of floors in a mission and the average floor size of the dungeons).

I think I can come up with a decent route, but my two biggest challenges at this point are optimizing my inputs and coming up with the money for a 3ds capture card and various streaming supplies if I actually get serious about it.