Hello! About 1-2 weeks ago I was doing runs of beating All Duelists AFTER already having beaten both sides of the game. It's a topic that has been brought up and dabbled in a few times over the years, and in my recent runs I was hoping to standardize some things. Here is the best run I could achieve before at least taking a break from the category:

The base idea of this speedrun is a simple concept: defeat all duelists once as quickly as possible. But, it's more about how this is handled that is important. I think it's important to iron out creases before fully putting this category up to be tackled.

This is how I ran the category:

1. I am recording from starting the emulator/console, this verifies I've loaded the game without using any savestates (in line with recent rulechanges on savestates).
2. I start the timer from Continue.
3. I then defeat all duelists, the timer ends on confirmation of "You Win" pop up box on the 21st duelist - same as categories being ran currently.
4. In the same recording, go to the deck edit screen to verify the contents of my deck.

For starting from "Continue", this I think is open for debate and it's not any more or less fair to start from the time you press X on the first duelist, but I felt it would be more consistent. That is debatable, but I don't think starting from the loading confirmation box over Continue is really worth a difference, I say either of those options leads to Continue being a more sensible timing.

As for verifying the editing of the contents of the deck, I just don't see any reason not to. If you can't confirm your deck contents, then you'd have to otherwise prove the contents of your deck, which I think no matter how you slice it is just a poorly controlled way of doing it eg submitting a deck list after the fact still wouldn't prove those are the cards you actually used in the run (unless you drew cards throughout the run that literally proved the contents of your deck through it, even then... lol)

Something else that can be discussed would be a ruleset, and I think the only thing worthy of debate is if you should or should not be able to use cards that you can't normally obtain in the game. In which case, I argue a strong NO for multiple reasons.

1. You shouldn't own the cards, its actually impossible to gain them without cheating, whereas literally everything else is achievable within the game and is fair play.
2. If you DID theoretically allow all cards in the game, it allows the classic Underlordtico Riryoku FTK strategy, which means that literally every other possible strategy is slower than just rolling for FTK's, basically making all other cards/strategies obsolete and therefore fully defeating the purpose of creating/having this category in the first place
3. Allows people to set up their own files or just run from their own already existing saves without having a disadvantage compared to runners that have resources - this is even more so with emulators as its very easy to get all cards/max rank compared to console which would require someone purchasing a second hand cheating device from 15-20 years ago.

For rule 3, I currently understand that there will be standardization and tutorials of allowing all people access to a file that makes the game runnable, but it doesn't mean every single person who wants to run the game on console will go to the effort of doing things they havent done before, and might just wanna run with their save file for fun or whatever in which I say why not.

Also bonus footnote for rule 2, the only card that would have a significant impact on the run would be Riryoku itself, so I don't think its worth arguing against for the sake of including cards like ritual monsters in a dead because they'd be terrible anyways

I could do a full writeup about why this should be a category, but I don't need to because as far as I am aware it's going to be. So I just wanted to lay these things out potentially for anyone interested to discuss. I'm keen to talk more about the category in some capacity after its out, but for now I just wanted to emphasize what I think is important ground for the category. The skinny is that this allows people to run the game outside the vacuum of starting with Patrician of Darkness and entering passwords, which I think ultimately is a better thing for the game, and hopefully we can see more developments of the game.

It's pretty clear to me that Machines are simply outright head and shoulders above every single other type of deck to run the game outside of a real time attack of beating all duelists, as it's capable of defeating all duelists in 2 or 3 turns depending. It would be very surprising to me if this was proven not to be true, but I guess we wont find out until people are trying to grind for the best time!

To finish, the segmented speedrun I was able to put together within a few days:

Check out the new category here: https://www.speedrun.com/yugiohdotr/full_game#All_Campaign_Duelists_NG

:)