Although we’re only into the 3rd month of 2026, Umamusume: Pretty Derby’s Global servers are gearing up to celebrate the 1st Anniversary event during March. If you’re trying to figure that out, just remember that the Global server is on an accelerated timeline to try and help bridge the 5 year gap of content between Japan and Global. That means that March is a far more packed month than it might initially seem when it comes to the game, and so this week we’ll be taking a look at the month ahead and what you can look forward to or plan to save up for. One of the biggest things off the rip: Trackblazer, the third Scenario, will likely not arrive until the very end of March and more likely the beginning of April, meaning that March is the final month of Unity Cup being the dominant content in the game.

We covered Trackblazer and what it will mean for the game, and if you’re new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we’ve got a collection of articles to help you learn the game, understand the various systems, and even approach the non-game side of the franchise and how unique and interesting it is. Although there’s only a few days left, the Umamusume movie Beginning of a New Era is still playing in theaters in North America, so you can even go see the film if you’ve got a showing near you!

Champions Meetings: Dirty and Long

There are two Champions Meetings in March. We introduced the basics and strategies for one of them last week, the Aquarius Cup, which will likely open up for registration the day you’re reading this. Aquarius Cup is unique because it is the first Dirt Champions Meeting we have, and will have, for a while. If you’d like to compete in it, I recommend reading our guide! As a quick rundown, the Aquarius Cup is a Tokyo Dirt race, coming in at 1600m Mile length, run during Winter in Sunny weather on Firm conditions.

Aquarius Cup is unique and possibly a little frustrating depending on your available roster; while it is nice to see a Dirt race, there really aren’t many Dirt trainees in the roster, so if you weren’t planning on trying to engineer a few and didn’t pull trainees like Oguri Cap, Agnes Digital or Smart Falcon, you may find this CM to be a far more punishing and possibly even exclusive race compared to the others.

At the end of March, we’ll see the return of Long Distance Champions Meetings with the Pisces Cup. The Pisces Cup is a 3200m Hanshin Turf race run during Spring in Rain on Heavy conditions, meaning that it is an extremely punishing stamina based challenge. We’ll be covering how to properly train for the Pisces Cup later this month, but you may already have some fairly solid Long Distance trainees if you’ve been participating in these events for most of the last year; if not, never a bad time to start, and once again, Gold Ship remains a highly competitive option.

Support Card Banners and Narita Top Road

March doesn’t have a ton of “new” Support Cards, and the ones that it does have are fairly easy to consider skipping. The first banner we’ll see for March is a rerun of Kawakami Princess Speed and Fine Motion Wit. Fine Motion is one of the best cards in the game, and Kawakami Princess is a fairly good Speed card, so of any of the banners this month, it may be the best option especially if you’re looking to get an MLB copy of Fine Motion either through pulling her or using the Rainbow Crystals. The issue is that Kawakami is a good, but not amazing, card, and if you aren’t prepared to pull all the way to 200 for a pity copy of Fine Motion, you should consider skipping this banner. If you’re prepared to go all in and have 30k Carats saved up to use and lack Fine Motion, however, you’ll find that she’s a great card that remains highly valuable into Trackblazer and beyond, remaining one of the best Wit cards in the game for a considerably long time.

Admire Vega Guts

Very good SR for Trackblazer, but don't pull just to get it; pulling only for SRs is not a good investment!

The more controversial take here, perhaps, is that you should also skip the Narita Top Road banner that is set to release on March 12th. Narita Top Road is a fairly good card, but she pales in comparison to Matikanefukukitaru Speed. She also is nowhere near as good as Kitasan Black Speed, and the idea that NTR’s card is invaluable to MLB is a trap meant to waste your carats. Unless you are an omega-Whale who has the money and Carats to burn, this banner is skippable, and a very good lesson in that there really are few “limited” things in this game; you do not need NTR Speed and you can and will likely obtain it later, but unless your card roster is severely lacking, save your currency; if you had to choose between this or Fine Motion, Fine Motion is by far the superior banner to go for. There is a new SR that should debut with this card, SR Guts Admire Vega, which is a very useful card to MLB for the upcoming Trackblazer scenario. You should, if you're lucky, be able to snag a few copies of her with the free rolls we get for the anniversary, and if you feel you have the budget to spare, try to get a few copies; rolling exclusively for SRs is never a great idea, though.

Narita Top Road

This is a bait card; due to our accelerated schedule in Global, this card is ONLY good for Trackblazer, and thus a big waste of investment.

The third banner in March is Curren Chan SR Speed and Marvelous Sunday SSR Guts; this banner is inherently skippable, sadly. As much as we all love MARVELOUS SUNDAY, the Guts card version of her is not particularly useful, especially compared to her other versions (especially her Wit card). It doesn’t have spectacular Race bonus to training, and while it does provide 30% Friendship Bonus at MLB, that’s still a heavy investment in a card that provides very little benefit. The Curren SR card is one you’ll likely collect over time by virtue of being an SR, but there are numerous other SR Speed cards that are far more valuable that you may already have.

The final set of Support Cards for March includes SSR Curren Chan Wit and SSR Zenno Rob Roy Speed, and, sadly, another banner you can very likely skip pulling on. March is a bit of a down month in terms of pulling and collecting for your Support Cards, and that’s totally fine, because there will be some very valuable banners coming up in the near future that you’ll want to save for; this also means that if you really feel like your Support Cards are anemic and you have the Carats, pull on the Fine Motion Banner and then save for the rest of March until the next month’s banners come up, as we’ll have some big hitter cards like Summer Maruzensky on the horizon.

New Trainees: Ei, Ei, Mun!

March has a new slate of trainees also, including our first expansion of 2 star trainees, meaning that the available amount of easily obtainable trainees will be going up; you’ll still want to hope to get your 2 stars to 3 stars as soon as possible, but just the fact that the character pool is expanding beyond rare 3 stars is great. The first trainee we’ll see this month is Admire Vega, a 3 Star Medium racer who excels in End position. Her stats aren’t exactly fantastic to help her stand out from the various other Medium A trainees that exist, and while you can help Vega go from C Long to A Long with Sparks fairly easily, she’s not a trainee that you’ll need or that will shake up the meta; if you really like her design, obviously you should go for it, and if she doesn’t speak to you, save your Carats; just like with Support Cards, you’ll want to ensure you always have the ability to guarantee your target through the use of Pity, and unlike Support Cards, there’s pretty diminishing returns on gathering a lot of 1 and 2 Star trainees you already have for someone who isn’t going to set the world on fire.

The second banner in March comes with Kitasan Black’s debut as an actual trainee, along with the aforementioned 2 Star Trainee, Matikanetannhauser! Kitasan Black as a trainee is a fairly competitive Front Runner who is good at Medium and Long distance races, and her 20% Speed and 10% Stamina Growth make it pretty easy to train her to be competitive, especially with the fact that she’ll need both stats to be competitive in the distances she has to run. The biggest issue with Kitasan Black as a trainee is that… well… she can’t use her own Speed Card, which ironically makes training her a bit harder since there’s such a gap between Kitasan Black’s Speed card and other Speed Cards.

As for Matikanetannhauser, the ever popular hat wearing “Ei, Ei, Mun!” character finally gets her debut as a fairly strong Medium and Long racer. Her unique skills are recovery based, activating off of her being in the middle of the pack of racers at the middle of the race, along with a 20% Stamina and 10% Guts growth that means she’s an innate Stamina machine for training, allowing you to focus on Speed, Power, and Wit far easier. She needs help from skills to give her better velocity and acceleration skills, as her unique kit is mostly focused on recovery and doesn’t particularly help her other than that, but as a 2 star Trainee, she’s going to be someone you’ll be able to pick up fairly easily from pulling for other trainees in the future, and getting her to 3 Star may even be simple with the amount of Statues you have lying around and pulling extra copies of her.

Kitasan Black’s girlfriend Satono Diamond is also coming in March, arriving at the end of the month; unlike Kitasan Black, she’s fairly competitive but has odd stat growth, 15% in Stamina and Wit. Like Kitasan, she’s also very good at Medium and Long races, and runs from Late Surger position, a position that doesn’t have a lot of fantastic competitors at the moment. Her Unique skill has a conditional trigger that helps it remain useful if she’s in the back or front of the pack, and she’s sole owner of a unique Gold Green skill for Right-Hand races, so she has some interesting abilities to play with if you think she’s worth your Carats.

Finally, our last new trainee of March is another Mejiro: Mejiro Bright, who has a frankly bizarre set of stat growths at 14% Stamina, 8% Guts and 8% Wit. While gaining in three stats is conceptually nice, none of these are fantastic, although it may allow you to train her by focusing on Speed and Power and hoping the passive growth in these stats fulfills your needs. She’s another Medium and Long distance racer, who can run well in Late Surger or End Closer. Her Unique skill has a conditional growth to how much speed it provides her based on her remaining Stamina when it activates, and it may come as no surprise that her innate skills include multiple recovery skills (including 2 Golds). Truth be told, the same adage applies here: Mejiro Bright is a character you pull for because you fell in love with her design and personality, not because she is exceptionally meta changing. If anything, March is either pull for Kitasan Black or save, as there are some really solid banners coming in April. Again, if you do see someone that you feel you’d love to make your Ace, then always pull for them, otherwise, save your Carats and be patient!

So If I’m Not Rolling, Then What?

There’s some great stuff to partake in during March, namely the Anniversary events and missions that will reward you with copious amounts of carats, in game resources, and the prized SR and SSR crystals, as well as selector tickets. The tickets allow you to select any trainee up to New Years T.M. Opera O and Haru Urara, and the SSR Support Cards allow you to pick any cards up to Admire Vega and Matikanefukukitaru. You can also purchase (with real money) another set of these tickets, so you should be able to easily get what you want or feel you are missing by playing during the anniversary and depending on your level of investment and comfort with spending money in the game. Since this is an anniversary event, you’ll also be getting 50 free pulls on Kitasan Black’s trainee banner and another 50 free pulls on the NTR Card banner, so if you’re saving your Carats, you’ll still be able to feel like you’re pulling and gaining new things for your collection! Anniversary events in Umamusume are fairly generous, so take advantage of them; this is an especially good time to get back into the game if you fell off or put the game on hold for a little while. 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