Have you grown tired of the Champions Meetings that have been a slew of Long, Medium, Long, Medium, and Long races, only to have that broken up by a few Miles and even a Sprint? Well, if you are, then the age of Aquarius is upon you to help change things up a bit, as Umamusume: Pretty Derby’s first ever Dirt focused Champions Meeting arrives! And not only is it a Dirt race, it’s a Mile, meaning that the actual options are far more limited and far more perplexing than they might initially seem for who, and how, to train for the event.

If you’re a fairly new player to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Champions Meetings are the PVP events in which players are able to face off against one another by putting up their teams of 3 trainees each to see who can claim the crown; in practice, it is often a test of your ability to maximize training gains and produce the best quality trainee within a certain race’s parameters. If you want, you should probably check out our previous guides on the game first that go over Career Mode, Support Decks, Inheritances, and the basics of PVP, before you dive into this current event guide!

The Aquarius Cup: Down and Dirty

The Aquarius Cup is the first ever Dirt Champions Meeting, and that alone makes it pretty special compared to all of the previous ones before. While Umamusume does feature both Turf and Dirt tracks, the predominance of races, trainees, and big events all focus on the glorious Turf races on Japanese horse racing, while Dirt racing tends to be pretty much a bit of an afterthought. The Aquarius Cup itself takes place at Chukyo Racecourse, a Tokyo Dirt course that is 1600m (Mile) distance from the Left side in Winter with Sunny Weather and Firm Conditions. Quite a lot of that is pretty standard for many of the Champions Meetings that we’ve had so far, with the biggest thing that stands out by far is the track style. Many of the usual Green skills ares till pretty useful, such as Tokyo Racecourse, Sunny Days, Standard Distance, Firm Conditions, Winter Runner and Left-Handed, many of which were key to the rotation of green skills from the previous Champions Meeting.

This means that many of them are located in the same places, too, but as a good refresher for Green skills:

Firm Conditions is one of the most available, being located on Rice Shower Power and Super Creek Stamina, both of which also come with the ability to learn Swinging Maestro, meaning that one of the two should be in your deck anyway; another sleeper hit in the variety of cards you can pick is Seeking the Pearl Guts, because Seeking the Pearl is a card that can provide you with Uma Stan, even if if it isn’t the most reliable source of that skill. Barring any of those three, you can also obtain Firm Conditions from Nishino Flower Speed and Power, King Halo Speed and Power, Satono Diamond Stamina, Winning Ticket Stamina, Power, and Guts, and Meisho Doto Guts.

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

Left-Handed remains one of the most elusive, as it is primarily locked onto Silence Suzuka cards (Both SSR Speed and Guts cards),and beyond that, Mejiro Ardan and Halloween Zeno Rob Roy are your only real options. Tokyo Racecourse is even less common, only being located on Vodka’s SR and SSR, and otherwise only possible from various events from other trainees that you can then look to inherit as parents. Winter Runner is a similarly limited skill to slot into your deck, as Yukino Bijin is one of the only cards to carry it across her 3 incarnations, as well as Shinko Windy’s SR. Sunny Days is a little more available, appearing on El Condor Pasa Power, Satono Diamond Stamina, Mejiro Dober Wit SR and SSR, and Hishi Akebono Guts. As a reminder, you’ll want 3 of these Greens or some other combination of these and other early race skills to help trigger Groundwork if you’re running a Front Runner, which is highly likely to be competitive due to the shorter distance of the race overall as it comes in at a Mile.

The biggest quirk here, though, is Dirt aptitude, which will require either specifically trying to engineer a trainee who can be competitive on Dirt who is not normally, or looking to inherit at least a single spark from some parent in order to go from B to A aptitude, which is far easier. Since many Champions Meetings look to have S aptitude in specific things, “A” is the bare minimum, meaning that you’ll want a parent with 3 Star Dirt Sparks to try and push your A rating above that, even in the case of trainees who are naturally good at Dirt racing… which is not many.

The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere

the real Haru Urara never won a single of her 113 races, becoming a legend in her own way. Will you lead this Haru Urara to victory?

Trainee selection for this particular race is, as mentioned, very limited. There are only a few trainees who are inherently good at Dirt Racing: Smart Falcon, Agnes Digital, and Haru Urara (both base and New Years). And yes, that is actually it; you have a total of 4 trainees in the entire pool of trainees who come with A Dirt, and the next best options are B dirt. Of any Champions Meeting so far, this is by far the most restrictive and minimalistic of the races, which does make it interesting, but also makes it fairly frustrating to train for if you’re lacking a wide roster. In fact, this is the shortest list we’ve ever made:

Starters Only: Haru Urara

Some Pulls: El Condor Pasa

3 Stars with A Dirt: Smart Falcon, Agnes Digital

3 Stars that Require Sparks: Taiki Shuttle, Oguri Cap (Both versions), Fantasy El Condor Pasa, Gold City (both versions), Summer Maruzensky

If you’re a player who has a very small stable of trainees, then you likely will have at least Haru Urara’s base version, and Oguri Cap’s base version if you selected her from the free trainee ticket (or perhaps obtained her from the free roll events earlier). The others all require you to have rolled on their banners and hopefully obtained them, leaving El Condor Pasa the only other trainee that most players will generally have access to since she is a 2 Star trainee and likely came from various pulls you may have done.

So, for an extremely budget conscious F2P who has rarely pulled for trainees at all, the best possible team of three you can hope to field is Haru Urara, Oguri Cap, and El Condor Pasa, and there’s really not many other ways to spin it. Your access to trainees for this race is really going to be dependent on who you’ve pulled and how much you’ve trained them, and unlike many of the other Champions Meetings we’ve run so far, there really may just not be a “perfect” team available to you. Even as a free unit, Haru Urara is not a particularly amazing competitor -- she does benefit from being free, Dirt A, and good at Miles, but you’ll need to run her as a Late Surger, not the joke of running her as a Front Runner for her Career mode; unlike Career, positioning generally matters in CMs, and Haru will absolutely die as a Front Runner against stronger competitors like Smart Falcon or Maruzensky.

The Stats and Skills to Cross the Finish Line

As with almost every race, Max speed (1200) is your target for the Aquarius Cup, but Miles do require some actual attention to Stamina that Sprints did not, meaning that you’ll need to ensure you have around 600~700 Stamina; you can usually skip recovery skills unless you really need them or are afraid of Debuffers, and Debuffers are quite popular in the Global meta, so there is some merit to picking them up. Keep in mind that Christmas Oguri and Summer Maruzensky both require recovery skills to activate, and so you may want to seek out White recovery skills over Golds like Swinging Maestro to help supplement your speed and velocity skills.

As far as inheriting parent skills, some of the basic ones still remain good and desired: Angling and Scheming, Victoria por Plancha, Duty of Dignity Calls, Let’s Pump Some Iron, Triumphant Pulse, and Red-Shift are all ideal inherited skills for trainees (although in the case of Oguri Cap, that’s just her actual skill). You may want to also consider Give Mummy a Hug from Halloween Super Creek for a Pace Chaser, but otherwise there aren’t many other uniques to shoot for or consider when it comes to this particular race, but there is one other skill that you may want to look for: Agnes Digital’s non-unique skill Forward, March! (and her upgraded personal version, Lead the Charge!). This particular skill is probably one you’ve not seen before, and that’s entirely because of the fact that it only works on Dirt tracks. Although it is a positioning skill, positioning matters far, far more than it does in PVE modes, so consider grabbing the skill if you can inherit it, or if you’re training your own Digitan, grab it on her yourself.

You’ll also want to get as much Power as possible, perhaps even close to 1000 or more Power, and the other big number here is Wit. Wit scores above 600 are standard in most races these days, and if you don’t prepare for them, it is actually an incredibly hard stat to raise above that cap. While 600 will generally get you the skills you want to activate most of the time, your competitors are going to be running Wit scores that are 800, 1000, or even higher, enabling them to almost always have their skills activate while you’re flipping coins and hoping for yours.

Riko Kashimoto

Possibly Riko's last hurrah for a CM, she can get you a lot of Stamina and Guts.

Much like the Capricorn Cup, this also means that your Support Card deck is generally going to be comprised of 2 Speed, 3 Wit, and Riko Kashimoto, and if you’re lacking Riko, 3 Speed and 3 Wit. You’re seeking to supplement your Power Requirements through Sparks, and generally obtaining enough Stamina from the course of the Unity Cup itself to give you what you need to be competitive in a Mile distance race. Riko is very helpful here because she gives numerous Stamina buffs and her card events give even more, so she can very easily get you to the numbers you need if you bring her along, as well as getting you access to It’s On! And No Stopping Me! For your troubles also.

There’s a very good chance this is our last Champions Meeting that takes place before the arrival of Trackblazer, meaning that this is also very likely the last hurrah of Unity Cup trainees; it will be interesting to see what it looks like once Trackblazer hits and the stat caps don’t raise, meaning that future Champions Meetings are likely to get more and more competitive on a razor’s edge as we get there. Until then, 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 dirt track!

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Tags: umamusume | Uma Musume Pretty Derby