Best Trainees for the Libra Cup in Umamusume Pretty Derby

We’ve got about a week and some change before the Libra Cup is fully upon us in Umamusume Pretty Derby, the penultimate Champions Meeting of 2025 and the first half “year” of the game’s global release life. A lot has changed in the time since the game first debuted, with a huge quality of life patch that hit in November that fundamentally changed much of how the game was understood, particularly in how various trainees functioned through improved unique skills, better overall career runs, and a vast improvement in most skills that seemed fairly lackluster. The Unity Cup scenario has also made it easier to raise good Umamusume, but also harder to raise someone extremely stunning and stellar.

While the meta has remained fairly stable perhaps even disappointingly so, there haven’t been many Champions Meetings to see how the rebalance patch has truly had an impact on them, and Libra Cup is fairly unique in the sense that there are two exceptionally strong trainees who are likely to dominate the event, and then other good choices that you could pursue, but it would be a lie to say that this event does not belong to two particular trainees specifically. Before we get into that, if you’re new to our coverage on Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we highly suggest you take a look at our other guides and tips, such as how to get started in Career Mode (and how Unity Cup works), Support Decks, PVP, Sparks, and Potential Levels. We also have a general overview for the Libra Cup that came out last week, so I highly recommend reading that first if you haven’t, but we will gently touch on some of the basics of the race!

Reminder: Open League and Graded League

Those of you who have participated in other Champions Meetings may remember some of this lecture, but for new competitors, there are two Leagues that you can select during the first few days of a Champions Meeting: Open, and Graded. The difference is what letter rank trainees can compete in which cup, with Open being limited to B rank, and Graded being completely open. Although it may seem oxymoronic that Open has more restrictions, the general idea is to help divide lower rank Uma’s from higher ranked ones. In practice, though, this actually tends to make Open League far harder and more cutthroat than Graded, because players who know how to min-max dominate Open League.

If you competed in Graded League for Virgo Cup, you have likely noticed the increase in skill cap for “ace” Umas, who are now generally pushing A+ rank; this means that trainees you had prepared for previous races that could work in new ones are likely going to be outmatched simply because Unity Cup trainees have stronger overall stat profiles and access to better skills; this means that you may actually be able to use some of your Gemini Cup trainees, you should be aware that your best ace trainee is likely going to be competing with trainees half a letter grade higher than they are.

If you haven’t started training in Unity Cup, you should absolutely try to do a few runs into the Scenario before the Libra Cup starts completely, and focus likely on the Ace you want to run in order to improve their overall stats and skills. Unity Cup has a small learning curve to it, so if your first few attempts don’t feel like they’ve produced anything new, you may need to ensure that you’re making maximum benefit from your Support Deck and your Teammates boost to your stats, and ensure that you are including either MLB R Riko or LB1 SSR Riko in your Support deck; she can also function as a Stamina Card, which is helpful due to the Stamina requirements in Long races.

The Libra Cup Basics: Back at it Again at Long Distance

The Libra Cup is our return to Long Distance in PVP, and while it isn’t quite as long as the Gemini Cup was at 3200 meters, it is still quite the distance at 3000! For those of you who competed in the Gemini Cup, you know this already means that Libra is more about Stamina than it is about Speed, because if your trainee can’t go the distance, then it doesn’t matter how fast they can potentially get. The Libra Cup is a 3000m race on Kyoto Turf run on the Right Outer Posts during Fall in Sunny Conditions on Firm ground. If this is your first Champion Meeting, these bold words are key terms that help determine the type of runners that are best suited for this challenge, but also the types of Green Skills that you will either want to hunt down or at least consider for your trainees to get an extra boost to their performance during the race. An important note is that Libra is a 3000m race, meaning that if you’re relying on Green Skills, you will need to consider tracking down Non-Standard Distance, and that if you are re-using trainees from the Gemini Cup, you’ll potentially be down a skill from other competitors.

The general statline that you’ll want to shoot for on your Ace (and ideally all of your trainees if you want them to be competitive) is 1000+ Speed, 1200 Stamina, 900+ Power (Ideally around 1000), 400~500 Guts, and 400+ Wit (higher is always better). Long races can be punishing because of the very high spread stat requirements across three stats, which don’t always train together extremely well. Speed raises Power, Power raises Stamina, and Stamina raises Guts, but in all of those cases the secondary stat never quite grows at a level in which spreading your training out over three stats will work ideally. You’ll need to likely consider inheriting Sparks in either Power or Stamina, and for many trainees, you may want that to be Stamina so that you can focus on training Speed and Power more, with Stamina being saved for explosive friend training turns or Summers. If your trainee has poor Stamina growth (10% or less), you will likely need to consider Sparks in Speed instead so that you can focus your training on Stamina, but it is fairly important to remember that 1200 Stamina AND two gold recovery skills is considered mandatory in this race; hitting that and high speed and power is good enough, because it doesn’t matter if you can’t quite min/max sometimes, just that your trainee survives the race. The Stamina needs are a constant thing to consider due to the popularity of debuffers in Global meta, and the fact that Stamina and Guts now are going to play a large role in your overall performance even more than before. While Guts had been slowly gaining importance due to being a secondary Stamina, the Nov. 11th update brought about a change that makes Guts modify your Speed, specifically your speed during the final Spurt of the race, and having less than 400 (and also missing your Stamina goal) means your trainee is very likely going to run out of steam or not be able to reach max speed and lose.

The Red Terror: Gold Ship

Gold Ship remains an incredibly strong pick, but top tier performance requires her to be at Potential 5.

If you are tired of not having a “meta” trainee that can help you do well in a Champion Meeting because you haven’t lucked out with pulling them, then do I have good news for you: The strongest trainee in this race is Gold Ship, a trainee that every player has available to them because she came with your game. Ideally, if you’ve been playing for a while, you’ve been able to promote your Gold Ship to Star Level 3, and possibly even have her Potential Levels raised to unlock all of her innate skills you can learn. But even if you’ve only got a Star Level 3 Gold Ship, you can still train an absolute terror for this Champions Meeting and do so with pretty strong regularity in your training runs in trying to build her.

A big reason for this is that Gold Ships has 20% Stamina Growth and 10% Power, meaning that she builds the most desirable stat for this race very easily, and a secondary stat also easily, meaning that you can primarily focus on training her Speed while having the other two grow without as much investment required to get positive results. Although Gold Ship has a reputation for being a difficult trainee due to her moodiness, a lot of that is shaved off due to the presence of Riko in your Support Deck. Friend Cards unlock Recreation events in which you get to interact with the friend from the card, and they always provide Mood Up, Energy Restoration, stat growth (primarily Stamina, in Riko’s case), and can even cure negative status. That means that if you get a bad outcome of a Gold Ship event, a single recreation event with Riko can raise your energy back, increase mood back to positive, and provide you with stat growth to avoid losing progress to a rest day.

If you do decide to train Gold Ship (and frankly, what are you not training her for here?) you will want to make sure that your Gold Ship ends up with Uma Stan, Swinging Maestro, Breath of Fresh Air, and then any other speed or acceleration skills you can muster. An extra Blue recovery isn’t a bad idea either. Because Gold Ship moves up during the race with her unique, you probably don’t want to inherit a skill like Nemesis, but Mejiro Ryan’s Let’s Pump Some Iron! Is a great choice, as is Triumphant Pulse from Oguri Cap. Uma Stan is very valuable on Gold Ship because of the nature of her Unique, which pushes her from the back of the race to the middle pack, and Uma Stan then triggering helps her speed past the pack and overtake the lead runners towards the end.

The skill Highlander can be considered something of a gamble. The skill reads “Improves Your Running on an Uphill”, but this race has two uphill segments, both of which come slightly before the final curve and spurt, meaning that if it activates at the wrong time, your Gold Ship can actually be afflicted with a status that isn’t exactly “negative”, but is instead the game registering that her running style dictates that she stay behind until the end of the race, meaning that Highlander triggering at the wrong time or in bad circumstances that would shoot her to the front can actually be a negative instead of positive outcome; consider it a gamble if you do end up taking it.

Narita Taishin Is Good if She Gets Out of Her Own Way

God's Angriest Little Horse, Taishin is the star of Gemini Cup. Ignore her stat growth %s, all that matters here are her innate skills.

Gold Ship may be the “easiest” meta Uma who is likely to be top tier in this race, but another trainee can do as well if not better, and that trainee is Narita Taishin. The problem with Narita Taishin, however, is that her career is exceptionally difficult, in the sense that if you think Gold Ship is moody, you’ve not met Narita Taishin. Taishin has a mandatory event in which she drops 3 moods and gains Practice Poor, and there is nothing you can do about it. The “good” news is that winning the race that inspires it gives you a big stat boost and Practice Perfect, but mathematically it often becomes a bigger negative than bonus to your overall run, wasting time and training days. This is where Riko (Or a Friend card) comes in handy, because it can help mitigate some of the mood loss and prevent you wasting huge amounts of time, but Practice Poor is a devastating condition in which you may fail otherwise “safe” trainings due to it increasing your probability to do so.

Taishin has a few other quirks to her that make her difficult to train, namely that her kit as an End Closer puts her at a weird disadvantage against the Career mode and how it tends to operate. While her stats may be good, sometimes you just get blocked, and while the balance update addressed some of this, Taishin runs can often have a lot of difficulty based on the fact that she can struggle to gain enough fans if her races don’t go as planned, making it hard to raise her unique. The flip-side of this is “good” rolls on your races will make this a non-concern, as Taishin runs almost exclusively high fan count races.

Still, if you manage to get her moodiness and swinginess under control, Narita Taishin can absolutely be the best competitor in this race. Her kit has exceptionally strong skills, namely Sleeping Lion and Encroaching Shadow, but this also means she needs to be Potential 5 to truly take advantage of her innate kit. This means that in general, Narita Taishin requires extremely heavy investment to perform better than Gold Ship, but Gold Ship is incredibly easier to train, obtain, and utilize, and requires far less material investment into. If you don’t have Taishin, she isn’t exceptionally worth deeply trying to pull out of recruitment.

But, if you happen to have both Gold Ship AND Narita Taishin at competitive level, training both of them can create an exceptionally strong team that could grab you a high ranking in the competition if not the win, as this race heavily favors End Closers and Late Surgers.

Positional Advantages

As mentioned, Libra Cup, like Gemini Cup, heavily favors Late Surgers and End Closers. That means that running an entire team of racers in those positions can likely perform very well, assuming they’re all well trained and race ready. A big reason for this advantage is due to the lower Stamina requirement for those positions compared to Front Runners and Pace Chasers (and let’s not even consider the issue of Runaway, but there’s no way to make a Runaway work in this race at this point in time).

Groundwork is considered an absolutely required skill for Sprint and Mile trainees who run in front, like Seiun Sky.

If you’re running a Front Runner, you’ll need to ensure they have Groundwork, perhaps the most restrictive skill set of any position. Groundwork alone can be difficult to ensure you obtain due to how few options you have to obtain it (and only one guaranteed one in Smart Falcon’s SSR card events), but then also at least 3 early race skills (such as Greens) and possible skills like Early Lead to even further boost your chances of taking the lead. With the chance of Runaway Silence Suzuka’s in the mix, Front Runners will also need to have strong skills that allow them to combat Angling and Scheming not being 100% reliable, so good skills like Red Shift from Maruzensky can help fill that gap. However, due to the Stamina issues of Libra Cup, you will likely find that Seiun Sky the best option here; ironically, Summer Maruzensky doesn’t perform quite as well as she did in other races compared to previous ones where she was the target Front Runner.

Daiwa Scarlet Profile

One of the other free starter racers along with Gold Ship, Daiwa can work, as long as she's at Potential 5, and inherits some stats in Long.

Pace Chasers greatly struggle in Long races because they have the highest overall Stamina requirement of any Style, and that hasn’t changed between Gemini and Libra. That being said, with Breath of Fresh Air buffed, it can be a lot easier to run a Pace Chaser if you are able to give them enough recovery to deal with the race’s requirements, but you’ll certainly want to ensure that they have some ability to overtake at the end. Let’s Pump Some Iron is a great skill to help out, and many Pace Chaser uniques are often very solid, and so most of them will work great (and many of them work exceptionally great now thanks to the balance patch), but trying to run a Pace Chaser in this race is an exceptional challenge and not overly recommended.

Late Surgers have always been competitive in most of the PVP meetings, and this one is no different. The biggest change is that End Closers are a bit better than Late Surgers here, but racers such as Vodka can be great, as can Agnes Tachyon, if you have access to her upgraded version. Super Creek can also work, although it is worth noting that Halloween Super Creek does not have the same innate skills and actually will require Gold Recovery skills to help her out.

The End of Year 1 (Kinda) of Umamusume!

With Libra Cup, there’s only one more Champion Meeting before 2025 ends: Scorpio! We’ll begin to discuss Scorpio soon, as it is the first rainy race and a fairly nasty competitive event to boot. But before that, we still need to clear Libra and talk about the upcoming changes and big things on the horizon, so as you prepare for Libra, we’ll begin to look to 2026 for Umamusume and what you can expect. If you have any questions, please leave us comments down below, drop by the Goonhammer Discord if you’re a Patron, or even email me at marcy@goonhammer.com! Until then, see you out on the track!

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Tags: umamusume | Uma Musume Pretty Derby