A new horizon for Umamusume: Pretty Derby has just arrived with the sudden update of Global to the full year anniversary patch, meaning that for the first time in these PVP prep articles, there’s not much of a precedent to work off of; Global is now in its own era and own meta, and that means that PVP is now not only more varied, but also far more exciting! And what better way to ring in the holidays than with a PVP race around the Thanksgiving table (assuming you’re American)? Well, never fear, your family holiday can be far more interesting if you’re prepped for the next race in the Champions Meeting series: The Virgo Cup.

If you missed the update about what exactly is changing in Umamusume and why it is so important to the game’s new era, we have an overview from last week that’s got you covered. And now that Unity Cup is also active on Global, you’ll want to get primed to train your new aces using the new career scenario, allowing you to reach new heights. There’s truly never been a more exciting time for PVP in the Global sphere, so let’s get down to business covering what you need to know in order to make the most of your Virgo Cup races!

Unity Cup and Training Aces

Before diving into the Virgo Cup specifics, let’s first take a moment to talk about the Unity Cup Scenario. Although you can still run the URA Finale (and it is generally faster to do so for things like Parents or Spark farming), training your new aces (the racers you’re looking to be most competitive with in PVP events like Virgo Cup!) is going to take place in Unity Cup, a new scenario with a brand new set of conditions and training events that can catch players off guard if you’ve become a little too complacent with your URA Finale runs. First, Unity Cup utilizes a team racing system that interacts with your trainees career, happening every 6 months and providing potentially huge bonuses to your parameters for performing well in them.

We’ll mention her in a bit, but a big part of the Unity Cup and training aces is also going to come into your ability to make use of Riko Kashimoto’s Support Card, which may seem odd as she doesn’t deliver any unique skills of her own, but instead it is the bonuses she gives to training that makes it important. To get the best results from the Unity Cup and for your Ace’s training, you should always try to include Riko in your Support Deck. There’s some flexibility here, as an MLB R Riko is actually superior to an SSR LB0 Riko, so don’t worry if all you’ve gotten so far from the free 10 pulls (you have been collecting those, right?) on her banner are R cards, they’re actually extremely good!

You may want to try a few Unity Cup runs without borrowing your ‘dream’ parents (Or just YOLO it, frankly, I do all the time) to get a feel for how the scenario works, but once you have the hang of it, you’ll start to see that your trainees improve greatly in quality and that what seemed like a “great” trainee before is now going to be “just okay”; you’ll never want to run URA Finale again for your best possible racer on the field; there is some merit to using URA for debuffers, but that really depends on if you want a debuffer or not anyway; since their job is to lose, they don’t need amazing stats, but Unity Cup will still probably give you a better overall trainee either way.

The Virgo Cup Basics: A Mile a Minute

Bouncing back to Mile distance, the Virgo Cup is a Mile Distance race run on Hanshin Turf at 1600m from the Right on Outer Posts during Fall in Sunny Weather on Firm Conditions. For those of you who are perhaps new to PVP training in Umamusume, Champions Meeting races provide all of the information you need about the race in their title cards, and these details are important to fishing for Green Skills that will give your racers specific flat stat parameter buffs that can help them pull out the win. These are even more important in the case of Front Runners who rely on the skill Groundwork, as Green Skill activation are automatic and will work to trigger Groundwork.

While Mile is not a skill, there are a lot of Mile skills that you can consider for your racer, as well as shooting for their Aptitude to grow from A to S, but due to the rebalancing changes, many of the skills that seemed not overly valuable like Mile Straightaways or similar are actually going to be considerably better than they were, and you could consider picking them up to help round out your trainee.

The specific Green skills you’ll be looking for on Support Cards or in training events are as follows: Hanshin Racecourse, which will help give your trainee improved performance at Hanshin, Standard Distance, which improves Speed on courses that are in multiples of 400m (or just 4, to make it simpler), Right-Handed, Outer Post Proficiency, Fall Runner, Sunny Days, and Firm Conditions. If you’re trying to obtain a Front Runner that needs Groundwork, you’ll need at least 3 of these to help you out, and getting as many of them as you can is going to go a big way to gaining some extra stats and support to your trainee’s overall package.

Even if you aren’t training a Front Runner, these skills are valuable because they provide flat stat boosts to their relevant stats. Sunny Weather, for example, provides Guts (which you now want), while Standard Distance provides Stamina (Which you also want). Green Skills are always great to obtain, even if they aren’t 100% mandatory for every position, and generally are worth picking up in addition to more valuable skills like Unique inherits or other Gold Skills. The exception here is Front Runners who need Groundwork to activate, and thus need numerous early game skills (Greens) to make that a possibility.

To Go Even Further Beyond First: Runaway Silence Suzuka

Although Global is entering a new Meta era in which many things are possible, one thing you may expect to see (or can try training for yourself) is the new “secret” running style that is currently unique to one specific trainee: Silence Suzuka. It is important to note that this strategy will not be actually available until the patch drops on Nov 11th, so while you may be reading this before then, don’t blame me if you don’t read. You cannot activate the Runaway skill or even get access to the choice until the patch goes live on the Global Server, so ensure that you are waiting until then before trying to train a Runaway Silence Suzuka!

So what is a Runaway? Well, they’re essentially a Front Runner who runs even further in the front, dominating the race and maintaining the First position possibly all the way from start to finish. If you ever found it troublesome that your Front Runner never seemed to really break away from the pack before or clinch a dominating win even with a good performance, then you might be the type of person that finds Runaway enticing. The problem is that it is only available to Silence Suzuka, and must be purchased during her career run in order to be accessible. The second part of this is that Runaway racers require roughly 3.5x the Stamina of Front Runners, because they are burning their Stamina far faster and harder than any other competitor.

If you enjoy the idea of flashy, huge lead wins that blow the others away, Runaway can be great, but it can also be an all or nothing style of racing, especially if someone else is playing a Runaway trainee. This also means that if you are looking to build Front Runners, you’ll need to contend with the fact that you may not actually be able to easily activate your skills like Angling and Scheming if there’s a Runaway racer in the event as well, as they may be farther ahead than you are even if they are burning out at the final corner.

This can certainly feel great when you win, but the requirements are quite high: a Runaway Silence Suzuka needs an absolutely herculean amount of stats and skills in order to ensure victory (or you need a back up plan). You’ll not only need the usual 1200 Speed, but also 700 Stamina (at least), 900+ Power (at least), 400 Guts (at least, although probably not worth chasing this stat), and 800 Wit (at least) to activate skills when needed. You may even want to consider a Gold Recovery skill like Swinging Maestro, because Runaways need so much Stamina.

The New World of Global Umas Means… Use Your Fave

While there are certainly still some “tiers” of racers that will be the “Best” options for the Virgo Cup, and one that content creators will always discuss is which trainees will be the “best” picks, but the changes to Global Umamusume have really opened up the game to allow you to try almost any racer that you want, as long as you build them smartly and inherit the correct skills and train properly. Much like the previous Mile race, Speed and Power are the primary stats you’ll be looking to train, although the biggest change to every position is that Guts is now something you will want at least 400 of due to the way in which Guts now impacts speed in the Final Spurt of the race.

The change to Guts may be the way to see how many players in your lobbies follow the game’s meta or not, as so many early guides and discussions of the game spoke about how bad and useless Guts is, but with the surprise drop of the Anniversary patch buffs, Guts is now not only a secondary Stamina bank, but it ALSO contributes to your trainee’s final top speed in the last spurt of the race, meaning that ignoring Guts will likely cost you a victory against a similarly statted horse who has more Guts than your trainee does, even if you have more Speed overall; burning out means that your trainee will slow down, letting the racer with the greater staying power to blow to the front of the race.

That said, there are some specific trainees you may want to consider if you have access to them as they are overall “strongest” in the Mile, but also just in how the game currently looks, with a fairly wide and surprising range of options that include very few hard to obtain trainees. The “best” overall racers to consider for the Virgo Cup are Silence Suzuka (as a Runaway), who can be obtained for free easily with the selector ticket for simply playing the game, Seiun Sky (who remains a constant and strong pick in the game due to Angling and Scheming), Mayano Top Gun (due to the new addition of Shapeshifter to her kit which gives her a ton of versatility), Mejiro Ryan, Vodka, and perhaps surprisingly, Taiki Shuttle.

In the previous Mile PVP we discussed how Taiki Shuttle was good, but not exceptional, but with this surprise change to the game, she obtained a secret event (much like Silence Suzuka’s for Runaway) that gives her access to a skill called Head to Head. This skill, along with making her Unique more reliable, helps make Taiki Shuttle into the Mile Maven she was literally meant to be, and one that can perform exceptionally well in the Virgo cup.

Support Deck Suggestions

Since Virgo Cup is a Mile Race, the initial consideration for the Support Deck might be something like 4 Speed 2 Power, or 3/3, but… Unity Cup has changed things considerably, and you’ll likely need to experiment with more diverse deck construction to really get the best possible results. A Deck that consists of 2 Speed, 2 Power, 1 Guts and Riko (Either MLB R Riko or SSR Riko of any variety, preferably lb1 or higher) can potentially get you exactly the results you want, unless you’re trying to raise a Runaway Suzuka, in which case you may actually need to consider something like 2 Speed, 1 Power, 1 Guts, Riko, and a Stamina with Gold Recovery.

The challenge is that more diverse decks require higher limit break level cards, and that means you’ll hopefully be taking advantage of the free 100 pulls given during the Half Anniversary Event to round out your Support Card decks. Many of the later scenarios push more diverse deck building, but that often comes at the cost (or requirement) of LB cards that are far more effective than normal.

Normally, "R" cards are less valuable, but that 5% training effectiveness is actually better than LB0 SSR Riko, and far easier to obtain.

First, though, let’s talk about Riko. Riko is important because when she’s used in Unity Cup runs, she provides extremely high benefits that essentially make her a free Stamina and Guts card in terms of the amount of stats she provides, but also her card provides 5% (at MLB R) or higher (for LB1+ SSR) Training Effectiveness, meaning that any time Riko shows up during training, she gives you a flat 5% buff to whatever parameter you are growing.

If you can get access to it, an LB1+ Riko will be better, but again, MLB R will be sufficient and very effective.

I wanted to give a shout out to a card that gets overlooked, however: Seeking the Pearl SR Guts, “The World is My Oyster”. The reason for this is that the card has an event that can occur that gives access to the skill Uma Stan, a skill that up until this point has been almost exclusively locked to Gold Ship (both the trainee and the three Support Cards). Uma Stan’s effect reads “Slightly increase velocity when close to many runners”, making it exceptionally valuable in situations in which your trainee is likely to be near large packs of racers, particularly for Late Surgers or End Closers.

Don't overlook cards like this, one of the most reliable ways to actually obtain Uma Stan.

Also, due to the upcoming change on November 11th, Air Groove providing Groundwork is more reliable… if you use her in your deck during Unity Cup. This is due to the fact that Unity Cup’s friendship mechanic makes it easier to obtain skill hints, rather than the extremely limited window URA Finale provided. If you’re looking to grow a Front Runner, Unity Cup is going to make getting Groundwork easier, but now also the ability to possibly obtain Uma Stan consistently from Seeking the Pearl means that there are far greater varieties of cards that can be viable for the Virgo Cup thanks to this patch.

Selecting Your Trainees

As I mentioned above, you have a lot of options now due to how much the November 11th patch will make almost any trainee viable. That being said, there are still some great options that stand just a little ahead of others in terms of ease of training and performance.

Here are some general suggestions for trainees you can use in the Virgo Cup:

Starters Only: Vodka, Daiwa Scarlet (Pace), Sakura Bakushin O (Front), Gold Ship

Some Pulls: Mayano Top Gun, Mejiro Ryan, Grass Wonder

3 Stars: Silence Suzuka, Seiun Sky, Taiki Shuttle, Summer Maruzensky, Fuji Kiseki, Gold City, Meisho Doto, Rice Shower (Honestly, almost any 3 Star who can run a Mile is great).

I did want to point out that Rice Shower for the first time can make waves in this CM. Rice Shower is a fan favorite character, but her issue is that her Unique was not very reliable or useful, which often led to it activating too late to actually matter. However, with the November patch, Blue Rose Chaser is now actually functionally strong and useful, so if you’ve been dying for a chance bring Rice Shower to a Champion Meeting, now is your time!

Parents, Sparks, and Skills for Success

As mentioned above, you are going to want to consider parents that either have 9 star Speed or 9 Star Power Sparks. Whether you want both parents to have the same stat or split the difference is going to come down to what you have available to you, and also likely to what parent skills you are going to want. For Front Runners you’ll certainly need to look for Seiun Sky parents (unless you are training her yourself), as well as Red Ace and Maruzensky’s Red Shift/LP1211-M. If you’re training Seiun Sky, you may want to see if you can find a Summer Maruzensky to inherit her unique from, but that may be fairly difficult unless you rely on communities like the Umamusume discord to find parents (and someone who has already obtained her and gotten 9 Star sparks on). Also, Front Runners are going to want Groundwork, and thus also 3 early game skills, but there are so many skills that will now properly activate that having many early skills will make it far easier to take advantage of Groundwork.

If you’re running behind Front Runner, you can focus on inheriting parent skills like Oguri Cap’s Triumphant Pulse, and Mejiro Ryan’s Let’s Pump Some Iron. Late Surgers and End Closers will want Uma Stan, and many racers following the Front are going to want to look for the skill No Stopping Me!, which can be easily and 100% guaranteed from Unity cup by selecting “No Name” for your team name.

Virgo Cup and the Future

Virgo Cup will be a test for the Global server to see how it can do in a world in which following successful Japanese guides and translated/copied content from the original run of the races won’t provide nearly guaranteed success, paving a way for how the Global meta might shift in the future. If you found previous Champions Meetings boring because it felt as if Whales would win and you couldn’t (that’s wrong, by the way!), the new meta may provide you with something to try and see if you like this new wide open space the game’s update has created. 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