The Best Skills and How to Find Them for the Capricorn Cup in Umamusume: Pretty Derby

Later this week, registration will open up for the Capricorn Cup, the first ever Sprint distance Champions Meeting for Umamusume: Pretty Derby’s global release. We covered the general preparations for the event a few weeks ago here, but this week we’ll be focusing on the relevant skills you’re going to want to pursue for your trainees and how to most easily obtain them. In previous preparation articles we’ve tried to focus on Support Cards, but that was often not the only way to obtain a skill, so with some of the bigger updates and hopefully larger availability of options to you as a trainer, this guide will take a little bit of a detour to talk about the skills themselves, why you want them, and where best to get them.

If you’re new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, the game is a training management game in which you take up the role of Trainer for various racers, helping them through their personal career stories while working on training their stats; the Capricorn Cup is the latest in the line of PVP challenges, known as Champions Meetings, in which players face off with teams of 3 to see who has the best possible trainees. If you’re looking to get started, we have a catalog of guides you can check out that cover everything from Career Mode to Support Cards and Inheritances, as well as PVP in general, and I highly suggest you start there if you are unsure of what to do and how best to do it! Now, let’s talk about the shortest race we’ve had so far…

The Capricorn Cup: Sprinting at Full Speed

The Capricorn Cup is our first ever Sprint Champions Meeting, which brings with it a few specific challenges that come at a short distance. Unlike Long or Medium races, Stamina is far less of a concern than in previous races, as the strongest competitors will blast through the race before they ever have to worry about running out of stamina to complete it. That also means that while many of the Green skills (which are stat boosts based on various conditions) are good, a lot of the very important skills are related to velocity and acceleration for the race. The basics of the Capricorn Cup are as follows: a 1200m Sprint on Chukyo Turf, run from the Left, during Winter on Snow in Soft conditions.

Probably the most important thing off the bat is you’ll want to ensure your trainee has Turf and Sprint A, at least, and ideally, you’ll obtain S in those through inheritances from you parents; you can’t train these naturally, so look for parents that have good sparks in Sprint first, your chosen or preferred style (Pace, Front Runner, and so on), and Turf last. Although an S in any of these is great, Turf is the least important of the three, so focus on Distance first and Style second when Spark hunting for that.

Otherwise, your Green skills to hunt for are as follows: Left-Handed, which provides Speed, and is one of the hardest of our skills to obtain. You can get it from SR Mejiro Ardan Wit or career events from Silence Suzuka Speed or Guts, or Halloween Zenno Rob Roy career events. You can also look to inherit it from Silence Suzuka herself as a parent or grand-parent, as there are actually very few other places to obtain this one. If you have an LB3 or MLB Mejiro Ardan Wit card, she’s a solid choice for your overall deck considerations.

Snowy Days is actually the least available skill in the race pool, coming from Mihono Bourbon’s Power or Wit card (which was an event card, so if you didn’t do that event, you won’t have that card), or Yukino Bijin’s Guts card, which is… also an event card. Yeah. Your last chance is to inherit it, either from a trainee that learned it and earned sparks, or from a New Years Haru Urara Parent, which you really don’t want to do; while this does give you bonus Guts, you really can skip this one unless you are looking for Greens to proc Groundwork with and have few other options.

Standard Distance is a more familiar skill that has a fair amount of cards you can obtain it from, and many parents you are likely to take will also provide this skill; it can sometimes even be rewarded for various Scenario events such as from Unity Cup career events. The cards you can find it on are Nishino Flower Speed or Power, Eishin Flash Speed, Kawakami Princess Speed, El Condor Pasa Power, and Bamboo Memory Power; the characters Eishin Flash and Kawakami Princess can also obtain it from their careers, and Agnes Tachyon simply has the skill innately, so you may be able to easily fish for the skill through parentage (as Tachyon is a very common grandparent).

Breaking the trend a little bit for this race (which is that the Green skills are pretty hard to come by!), Wet Conditions is a power booster that has quite a lot of available options, and is the easiest Green skill to track down for your training. It appears on the following cards: Special Week Speed and Guts, Shiko Windy Speed, Smart Falcon Power, Biwa Hayahide Power, Mejiro Ryan Power and Guts, Manhattan Cafe Stamina (SR and SSR), Mejiro McQueen Stamina, Nakayama Festa Stamina, Sirius Symboli Guts, and Events from Agnes Digital Power, Halloween Tamamo Cross Power, and Mejiro Palmer Guts. There are also a few places to inherit it from, specifically Biwa Hayahide, Special Week, Smart Falcon, Agnes Digital, Mihono Bourbon, El Condor Pasa, and Mejiro Ryan. Of these all, the Smart Falcon Power Card is the best choice if you are raising a Front Runner due to her giving Groundwork, and as far as parents are concerned, El Condor Pasa or Mejiro Ryan are great parents for Pace and Late Surgers specifically.

Finally, Winter Runner remains a very difficult skill to obtain; it is available only on 2 types of cards: Inari One Power, and Yukino Bijin Wit and Guts (SR and SSR). That’s it! You can also try to inherit it from New Years T.M. Opera O or Biwa Hayahide, as well as Christmas Oguri, if you’re not trying to make her work for this CM. You can also consider looking for some other greens like Front Runner Savvy if you are really struggling for Greens in this race, which is on Silence Suzuka, Smart Falcon, and Mejiro Palmer’s cards. Again, Smart Falcon is the best choice because she also provides Wet Conditions and Groundwork, meaning you’d need a single other Green skill if you used her card to get Groundwork to proc.

The Groundwork Conundrum

If you competed in the Cancer Cup, you may be familiar with the skill Groundwork, a skill considered required for Front Runners to be competitive in the Champion’s Meetings from this point on in Umamusume’s meta. Groundwork functions by having your racer trigger at least 3 skills early race, and passive Green skills count as activated skills, meaning that most competitive front runners will be looking to obtain 3 Green skills and Groundwork as core parts of their kit. The Cancer Cup provided one of the first testing grounds for working Groundwork into skill builds, but it also presents an interesting and complicated problem for those looking to make Front Runners in Leo Cup (and longer distance races): The need for at least 3 Green Skills, Groundwork, and also the requisite Stamina Recovery skills, along with other desirable mid and late race skills one might want.

Yep, still important.

The problem is that Groundwork is not a very universal skill and is not easy to obtain from Support Cards; while this has become easier thanks to the November balance update by making it absolutely guaranteed if you have Smart Falcon’s SSR Power card, that still puts a lot of pressure on you getting the skill from a single card and having the event trigger (it usually does, to be fair). There aren’t that many great options to replace this card either, with Oguri Cap Power and Air Groove Guts still being the best possible options. Frankly, you are far better off looking to inherit it from Parents (Like a Seiun Sky, or Maruzensky) than you are relying on your deck, but since Front Runners absolutely need Groundwork in the current meta, you may want to try and work in one of the cards. Shockingly, Air Groove SR is a better choice than Oguri Cap SSR if you have it close to MLB; if not, Oguri Cap is the better choice. It is actually fair to state that if you do not have Groundwork available either from cards or inheritances, you may want to skip trying to train a Front-Runner all together.

General Deck Suggestion: Riko Kashimoto

Since you’ll be training your racers in Unity Cup (you HAVE been running Unity Cup, right?), a card you’re going to see in almost every deck suggestion I make here is either SSR LB1 Riko or MLB R Riko Kashimoto. This is generally due to the fact that Riko has numerous benefits to running Unity Cup and smoothing out your runs of it, and essentially functions as a proxy Stamina card due to the fact that she provides almost exclusively Stamina and Guts bonuses when you train with her or interact with her. The trick to utilizing Riko effectively though is that you need to get her to at least Green relationship status before (ideally) the first New Year event, so that you can unlock Recreation events with her.

Riko Kashimoto

Get ready to see a lot of this lady.

When you are offered a choice of three answers for the event “Unexpected Side”, you can actually fail to unlock her recreation events. This is effectively a career killer, and while the gamble on Choice 1 is 12 Stamina and Ramp Up hints, the downside is you don’t get to interact with Riko again, so always choose the second Choice, which guarantees that you unlock Recreation. Although the game now tells you this, I will tell you this also so you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

Once you have Riko’s recreation unlocked, you can utilize her for Recreation events which are great ways to manage your trainees mood (it always provides at least 1 Mood Up), energy restoration, and some Stamina / Guts for your time. This is a great option to resting when your mood dips, and unlike regular Recreation, you can’t really “fail” to benefit from it. Aside from that, Riko provides training effectiveness boosts, energy reduction, and even helps protect against training failure, making her an exceptionally beneficial card if you’re using her in Unity Cup.

There is another important reason you need Riko in your deck and need to ensure that you finish her Recreation events: Rushing Gale!, which is a skill you obtain a hint for if you complete her storyline. Although you can also get it from Tokai Teio Speed, you really won’t want to use her card for anything else, especially not in place of Riko; assuming you also do very well in your Unity Career, It’s On! is also valuable, and you can obtain it a bit easier with the stat boosts Riko provides (although It’s On! won’t determine a career, it is just a nice to have skill).

Sprints Are About Speed, Stupid

Champions Meetings have so far revolved around recovery skills and certain unique skills like Angling x Scheming, but Sprints are very different because they require basically no Stamina skills at all; you will be wasting your time looking to include them in your race, and skills like Swinging Maestro may not even activate due to their reliance on corners (of which Sprints basically have 2, at least). This means that you’re actually looking to target skills that improve your trainee’s Velocity or Acceleration, specifically towards the end of the race. For this, you’ll want to look for skills such as the following:

Kitasan Black

HARIKITTE IKOU!!

Professor of Curvature remains very strong; although it also requires a corner, it doesn’t really matter as much when this activates, unlike Swinging Maestro, and you don’t need to recover Stamina anyway. This skill is still only available from Kitasan Black’s SSR Speed card, but you either have an MLB copy or are borrowing one, so you should essentially always have access to this skill in your trainings. Turbo Sprint is another very solid skill here, and it comes innately on Sakura Bakushin O, meaning you can either grab it from training her or using her as a parent for someone else you’re training.

You can also consider the skills Slipstream or the opposite, Playtime’s Over!, which are more likely to be useful in PVP than they are normally. These skills rely on your trainee and their proximity to other trainees during a race, and PVP events are more likely to have racers all running closer to one another than PVE races do as many players will follow the same training strategy. This combo can help if you want to pursue it, although they aren’t do-or-die skills; Curvature, It’s On!, and Rushing Gale! are far more important options to pursue. The other issue is both of these skills are not that available on desirable cards we’ll be looking to use in our decks, so if you want them you may have to try and obtain them from parents over cards. The old stand-bys of Sprint Corners and Sprint Straightaways are worth grabbing if you have access to them, and you can also compliment those with Style specific options like Front-Runner Corners or Pace Chaser Straightaways.

Finally, you’ll want to consider your options for parents in terms of their Unique Skills, and there are a few very good options in this race. El Condor Pasa’s Victoria por Plancha is absolutely valuable on Front-Runners and Pace Chasers, and you should consider getting it on any trainee you’re looking to put into those positions. Because of the length of this race and the shape of it, Seiun Sky’s Angling x Scheming is actually far less valuable this time, as a considerable portion of the race takes place on a final straight; skip it this time around.

Keep Your Wits About You: Building a Deck

The particular type of race that Capricorn Cup is means that you’ll be looking to make a deck that doesn’t quite fit or follow some of the previous wisdom or suggestions in other builds; your deck can actually be quite lopsided and still produce extremely competitive results, and generally will be looking to run 3 Wit, 2 Speed, and Riko; you can also substitute a Wit card with something else, such as Power Smart Falcon, if you’re training a Front Runner. The reason for this is that your trainee really only needs Speed, Power, and extremely high Wit to compete in Capricorn Cup, and the best way to maximize your stat gains is to prioritize Wit and Speed. The other benefit of running 3 Wit is that selecting Wit training restores Energy, and better Wit training rolls (essentially, the more people on them in that stat), the better your energy recovery and overall gains will be.

The Stat requirements for Capricorn Cup are equally quite high: 1200 Speed, 1000+ Power, and 900-1000 Wit might seem like an impossible feat, but you’re mostly relying on Stamina and Guts gains from career events and other aspects of your trainee to fill things out. The best Speed cards you will likely find are MLB Kitasan Black and MLB Matikanefukukitaru Speed; assuming you have one of these, borrow the other, or essentially borrow whatever it is you don’t have current access to. The Wit cards mostly up to you, and you can use some of the Green skill suggestions above to fill them out; if you don’t need or care about them as much, SR Daiwa Scarlet Wit and SR Marvelous Sunday Wit are two extremely strong options. Hopefully this gets you started on any final attempts for trainees you’ll want to pursue, and 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, I’ll be training to hopefully see you all out there on the Chukyo Turf!

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Tags: umamusume | Uma Musume Pretty Derby