For the Set Seed category, I've come up with seed conditions that I think should produce the best possible time, given perfect inputs. If I remember correctly, a foil edition adds $4 to the joker price, holographic adds $7, and polychrome adds $10. This is important in calculating affordability.

• Ideally, as few hands played as possible, the less cards the better. After careful consideration, it doesn't matter too much what deck you use, since the bonuses of each have almost no weight.

Ante 1: Skip Rounds 1 and 2, giving two Investment tags. After playing a straight flush and defeating The Head in one hand, you should have $42 ($4 base + 15*2 + $5 victory + $3 in hands). The shop ideally has a polychrome Ice Cream and holographic Half Joker, which I think is $27. Ante 2: Skip Rounds 4 and 5, one with an Investment Tag and another with a Reroll Tag. The Reroll Tag makes sure that the Half Joker can be used, otherwise The Psychic would disable it. Now, a high card can be played to guarantee a win with 1 card, granting $26 ($15 tag, $5 win, $3 hands, $3 interest). Now, a polychrome Blueprint and polychrome Joker Stencil (used in that order) will be enough to carry through Ante 5. Ante 6) Before fighting Verdant Leaf, the shop should have a negative Blackboard in order to allow a one-card win. It is important to not sell any jokers here, otherwise one card would not be enough.

This hypothetical seed, in my opinion, should be able to produce times we couldn't even imagine. Given that one round (play and shop) takes around 10 seconds in my playthroughs, a sub-50 could realistically happen. Remember in the beginning that the fastest possible time uses perfect inputs.

I've been trying out some ideas for various new subcategories within RS and SS. What I have so far:

• All poker hands
• All Balatro hands (includes FH and 5x)
• All planets
• 15/20 planets
• All tarots
• 15/20 tarots
• Individual hand speedruns (I found the illegal ones to be the most interesting for this)
• Hand worth >1k, 5k, 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 250k, 500k, 1m (etc?)

Hoping to get one or both mods in on this, unless someone else needs to create the categories

I just wanted to create this thread to compare individual ante times. For those who want to look into their stopwatch/speedrun timer and post times, your contribution is appreciated - from there we can share time-saving methods, common cards and strats, etc.

I'll go first, using my 5:16 RS Skipless run: Ante 1: 52.0s (PR 41.1s) Ante 2: 48.4s (PR 36.1s) Ante 3: 1'01.1" (PR 40.9s) Ante 4: 1'07.6" (PR 55.7s) Ante 5: 1'11.4: (PR 38.5s) Round 16: 16.6s (PR 13.9s) Sum of segment PRs: 3'46.2"

Obviously these will be much faster in the other categories, but I think that RS has actual strategy (as opposed to just speed in SS) and is therefore more worthy of discussion here.