Min cycles? I'm not 100% sure, but it certainly seems like it, I put a much longer explanation in my showcase notes, but out of the three options of duplicating silver, duplicating gold, and starting by duplicating silver then switching to gold, duplicating silver turned out to be the fastest, but it leaves me a bit worried since if I do that I don't need the glyph of purification, and despite checking all three with some degree of thoroughness, it still feels like I could be missing something.

Overall though, this puzzle with the cycles metric is probably my favorite puzzle of the tournament so far.