Preparing for the Pisces Cup in Umamusume: Pretty Derby

As many people have experienced, the Trackblazer Era has arrived in Umamusume, and that means that chaos and destruction lay in its wake. On the heels of just trying to figure out how to even properly play the scenario properly comes the next Champions Meeting: Pisces Cup. And oh boy, is Pisces Cup a doozy. This Champions Meeting has the potential to be an absolute bloodbath in Graded Rank, as those who are able to master Trackblazer to their benefit and those who are still confused are going to create absolute gulfs in competitors in the bracket; that doesn’t mean you should go ungraded, though, because Open Bracket is still filled with the same min-maxers as usual. So what do you do? Well, aside from praying to the Three Goddesses for your Umanity, we have a guide that can help you out.

If you’re brand new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, you’ve certainly picked an interesting time to join the game! The newest scenario, Trackblazer, is already causing a lot of waves, and we have some guides on it if you need help. We also have numerous other guides about how Career Mode generally works, Support Decks, Inheritances, and much more for you to check out. We’ll be breaking down the Pisces Cup though in hopes of making one of the most daunting Champions Meetings so far seem not as scary as it actually is.

Rode Hard and Put Up Wet: Pisces Cup

The Pisces Cup is a Long Distance race, which may already give those of you who were here for the beginning of Champions Meetings a bit of anxiety, because Long Distance CMs mean Stamina Battles, which means recovery skills are key. This also means that you need to build Stamina, and as we’ve discussed in our guides to Trackblazer, Stamina is pretty hard to build with the strength of Guts based support Decks. But the length isn’t the only problem, because Pisces Cup also has Heavy Conditions and Rain, meaning that Stamina is going to be drained even further than before. That’s right, this race is quite literally about surviving it.

The Pisces Cup is a 3200m Long Distance race on Hanshin Turf run from the Right in Spring with Rain and Heavy Conditions. It also includes a final corner into a final straight that is Uphill, as if the already extreme Stamina conditions weren’t being nailed into your brain hard enough. Almost every positional racer will want to consider Green skills here to help round out your overall builds, and Front-Runners will want to consider it even more to help trigger Groundwork as is the standard these days; your particular Greens for Pisces are Right-Handed, Spring Runner, Wet Conditions, Standard Distance, Hanshin Racecourse, and Rainy Days.

As far as Stats are concerned, though, this particular race is really unforgiving. You are generally going to want to consider 1200 Speed, 1000~1200 Stamina, 1000 Power, 500 Guts, and 600+ Wit as a bare minimum to be competitive. These are of course assuming that you are generally going to be facing the best of the best and the most well trained of all possible competitors, but if you’ve been seeing people post their Trackblazer trainees on social media, you know that these numbers are actually not as impossible as they seem, and even moderately mediocre trainees can near these numbers. This is a tight competition and one you’ll need to likely give a few runs into to generate some usable trainees, which is even worse to consider in that Trackblazer takes a literal hour of time to run. Buckle up, cause this one’s not super fun, unfortunately.

Trainees to Consider

There’s a pretty wide array of trainees that you can work with for Pisces Cup, which is at least a nice change from the previous cup in which the Dirt track really limited who was viable to run successfully. There are a lot of F2P and even “easy to obtain” options, and depending on how your free pulls have been going or how your account looks up to this point, many of the trainees that can make a big impact here will perhaps already be in your possession.

The biggest thing to remember is that your trainees need to have Long A and Turf A to be competitive here, and getting them to S would be fantastic, but having that at least in mind still leaves you with a lot of options.

Here’s a list based on accessibility to the trainee:

Free to Play: If you only have the trainees that the game has given to you by default, you actually have some options: Daiwa Scarlet is a great Front Runner, and Gold Ship returns once again as an extremely strong End Closer.

Some Pulls: If you’ve got a few of the 1 or 2 star trainees (hopefully now raised to 3 stars through pulls or goddess statues), you also have some good options in Agnes Tachyon and Super Creek as Pace Chasers, Nice Nature as a debuffer in Late and the newly released Matikanetannhauser in Late as well, and Mayano Top Gun in End.

Ei, Ei, MUN!

Three Stars: Here the field is quite large, with Kitasan Black, Valentine Mihono Bourbon, Mejiro McQueen, Summer Maruzensky, New Years T.M. Opera O, BOTH Oguri Caps, Satono Diamond, Narita Taishin, Tamamo Cross, Manhattan Cafe, Wedding Mayano, Summer Special Week, Symboli Rudolf, and Narita Brian.

Of special note here is the recently released Kitasan Black, who if you weren’t already tired of having in your Support Deck, is now also going to be extremely valuable as a parent (or trainee) for a Front Runner. Her Unique, Victory Cheer, is exceptionally good for Front Runners and generally replaces Angling and Scheming (at least for this race, that skill is still very good), but the variability of Kitasan Black’s skill is important. To check the language on it, the skill states: “Moderately increase velocity when positioned toward the front on the third corner in the second half of the race. Or, kick forward hard when toward the front on the backstretch late-race.” For longer races, the second half of this skill is going to be crucial, and is often a tool that will get a competitive Front Runner the edge they need to get over the other racers at the end of a Long race. So if you don’t have Kitasan Black to train yourself, you should keep an eye out for a Kitasan Parent that you can borrow to provide your trainee with Victory Cheer.

Support Card Shuffle

The biggest thing about Pisces Cup and Support Decks is that you’re going to be working within Trackblazer’s confines in order to succeed; no matter what it is you WANT to do, you still have to train in that Scenario, meaning that you’ll need to build decks that take advantage of (or at least help) with the way the scenario functions. This means you’re still going to need to focus on decks that have 50% Race Bonus in them, and then try to worry about the rest of things from there. That can be a little non-ideal if you are strapped for cards or options, and it can certainly be one of the more restrictive races to train for in the bunch.

Generally, you’ll want to shoot for a deck that has 2 Speed, 2 Wit, and 2 Stamina, OR 1 Stamina and Riko Kashimoto. Although she’s still not as useful or mandatory as she was in Unity Cup, her passive Stamina and Guts gains are very good and can really help if you feel like you’re strapped for good Stamina cards. This does, however, mean that you may have to opt to move away from Guts decks for Pisces Training; they COULD still work, but you may find the Stamina requirements too tight to make work with everything else being asked of you.

This also means that one of your Stamina Cards is almost certainly going to be Super Creek due to Swinging Maestro being functionally mandatory again. This can be somewhat of a tricky issue because her Race Bonus is low until higher LBs, and so an LB0 Super Creek is going to give your deck some issues if you can’t compensate for the Race Bonus loss in other ways. You’ll also potentially find that Kitasan Black is less useful in this than before, but again that will really depend on your access to cards like Matikanefukukitaru and Narita Top Road; if you’re lacking a strong Speed Card, use Kitasan Black MLB if you have her.

As mentioned above, if you plan on training Kitasan Black, you won’t have access to her card, which does mean you’ll need to find a replacement for her; although not a Speed card, if you obtained the Wit Mihono Bourbon card from the Halloween event, she’s a very good Front Runner based Wit Card that you can use to help your Kitasan Trainee with certain skills and other boosts that she provides; she’s honestly a good Wit card in general for Front Runners, but will especially help your Kitasan Black.

Fishing for Wins

Pisces Cup can certainly be a slog in more ways than one, much of which is due to Trackblazer itself being the means through which to compete in it; we’re also only 1 Champions Meeting away from the full round of 12 before things reset, so you can look at this as a good practice run for the next few upcoming ones (including, yes, reruns of early CMs). Although it sounds daunting, Trackblazer does help provide you with excellent trainees once you master it, so spend a little time getting used to it and try to pace yourself with your trainings; you still have quite a bit of time before Pisces registration opens, and there’s still a few days if not about a week for the overall race to begin and thus gives you some space to really try your best at making a few trainees capable. Even at the limit, try to make one really strong Ace runner and a few others to support her and give it your best shot! If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot them over to me at marcy@goonhammer.com, or drop by the Discord and ask me there!

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Tags: umamusume | Uma Musume Pretty Derby