The Best Support Cards for the Scorpio Cup in Umamusume: Pretty Derby

We’re just about at the new year, and also, registration for Scorpio Cup is underway! While you still have time to train your team for the first few days of racing, the wire is certainly coming close if you’re trying to get trainees done or prepping your final member of your team, which is why we’ve got a guide on some of the best Support Cards you can utilize for this process if you’re scrambling or hunting for certain skills. As long as you register and you ensure that you win at least 2 rounds of Round 1, you’ll have around a week to really tweak a team or get a new member or two into your rotation.

If you’re trying to scramble some prep for Scorpio Cup because you’ve been having trouble getting started due to the holidays, we have two guides you can check out, one going over the race itself, and another about trainees that are worth training and trying to run. We also have numerous guides on Career mode, PVP in general, Inheritances, and Support Card Decks if you’re very new that can help you get started.

The Scorpio Cup: A Short Medium Rain

The Scorpio Cup is a Medium distance race (2000m) in Tokyo run from the Left in Fall with Rainy Weather and Soft Conditions. As we’ve established in previous articles, these details are important to note for Green skills, but also for the type of race you can expect, and as mentioned. The Scorpio Cup is the very first soft, rainy Champions Meeting, meaning that it already has a few odd things going for it, but something else that might stand out is that while it is Medium, it is actually a shorter race than others. The poor conditions will also impose a fairly annoying Power penalty on racers, and the fact that it is far shorter than other Medium races means that certain abilities, like Straightaway Spurt on End Closers, will be far less useful than other races.

Tokyo Racecourse is perhaps harder to obtain than it might seem, currently only being available on Vodka Speed or Vodka Power, meaning that you may not want to shape your deck around this skill and instead hunt for parents you can hope to spark the skill from them instead. Although it does help for skills like Groundwork to have more Green Skills available to you to learn, Tokyo Racecourse is perhaps one of the less valuable ones, so if you can’t get it or are finding it hard to work it into your deck/rotation, skip it.

Standard Distance is by far more useful and trains the same stat (Stamina), being available on numerous cards, specifically Nishino Flower Speed, Eishin Flash, Kawakami Princess, El Condor Pasa and Nishino Flower Power, and also appears in Bamboo Memory’s events. Of these, Eishin Flash and El Condor Pasa are simply good Support Cards, often being valuable to take if you have them for their overall benefits (read: they help you regain energy).

Wet Conditions is another very available skill to hunt down that is extremely useful in this race. For one, it helps with Groundwork, but the other thing is that Wet Conditions helps increase your power AND overcome the general drain that wet racetracks create, and Scorpio Cup is the first race we’ve had in which wet weather is a factor. If you’re looking to track it down, you have numerous options: Special Week Speed and Guts, Shinko Windy, Manhattan Cafe, Mejiro McQueen, Nakayama Festa, Smart Falcon Power, Biwa Hayahide and Mejiro Ryan Power, Mejiro Ryan Guts, Sirius Symboli Power, Tamamo Cross Power, Mejiro Palmer, and Agnes Digital. To match that, Rainy Days is a great second option that you can help with your Guts and the sloppy track condition, and helpfully, often comes on many of the same sources: Special Week, Manhattan Cafe, Mejiro McQueen, Mejiro Ryan, and Agnes Digital all have both Rainy Days AND Wet Conditions.

The last two universal Green Skills that can be helpful for Scorpio are also fairly uncommon, being Left-Handed and Fall Runner. Left-Handed is available in Mejiro Ardan’s Wit Card, Zenno Rob Roby’s Speed card, and both Silence Suzuka Speed and Power. If you’re training Silence Suzuka blocker, you can also get the skill that way, just as a note (since you can’t use her card); as for Fall Runner, that skill is only currently available on Fine Motion’s SR Power and SSR Wit card, making it as uncommon as Tokyo Race Course; if you have access to Fine Motion’s SSR Wit, it is still a great card and worth including, but otherwise, you may want to try and inherit this skill from parents instead of building a deck around it.

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.

Groundwork isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

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.

General Deck Suggestion: Riko Kashimoto

The woman of all time, 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.

When you are offered a choice of 3 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.

That said, if you DO need to replace a card in your deck, always start with Riko. Yes, you’ll probably miss some of the benefits, but if the difference between your deck is running Riko or a card with skills you absolutely need (such as Groundwork), then always choose the skill if it will make or break your trainee; you’ll just have to hope that you roll higher on training events and may need to keep in mind that you’ll be missing out on quite a bit of free Stamina/Guts, and most importantly, mood modifiers.

Swinging Maestro: Not Just for Goo Goo Babies Anymore

Rice Shower Power is an excellent source of Swinging Maestro, don't skip her especially for Unity Cup runs.

One of the biggest changes to deck making meta is that unlike previous runs in which recovery skills meant having Super Creek, the new Rice Shower Power card is actually a better and far more consistent option for the skill than Super Creek. Riko generally fulfills the role of Stamina Card in your deck, and Super Creek really isn’t a “great” card until LB3 other than her providing Swinging Maestro, whereas Rice Shower Power has quite a few good upsides and works well in your deck, but also has a very beneficial secondary aspect: She receives Scenario Link boost for Unity Cup, as she features in the main story of the scenario heavily and that provides some extra incentive to utilize her (Although her Team name skill, Cooldown, is better for Long than Medium).

If you are limited to choose, don’t feel bad: as long as you can get access to Swinging Maestro, just ensure you have the skill, and worry about the rest after that. Both cards are good, and obviously better than nothing, but if you have to make the choice between the two, you are better off getting Rice Shower in your deck over Super Creek, and at the very least, avoid putting both fo them in there; for Scorpio Cup, Rice Shower also provides quite a few debuff skills if you’re trying to build a debuffer, although she mostly targets Pace Chasers.

Decking The Halls: Kitasan, Speed, Wit, Riko

HARIKITTE IKOU!!

In most cases, your decks are going to actually look very similar regardless of what Style your runner is going for, and will generally be based on what types of cards you have, and what level those cards are at. If you have 2 MLB SSR speed cards, particularly MLB Kitasan Black and another very good card like Biko Pegasus, then your deck will also likely have 1 Power Card (Rice Shower, OR if you cannot access to her, Super Creek for Swinging Maestro), Riko, and then 2 Wit Cards. Wit Cards generally are for providing skills but also maximizing your Energy recovery from choosing Wit training and being safe options for your turns rather than wasting them on resting.

For Front Runners specifically, although you might expect after what I said about Groundwork that these suggestions will come with SSR Smart Falcon, Air Groove Guts or Oguri Cap Power, I actually really suggest you track down a Parent with Groundwork (if not 2) to utilize for that skill instead. For one, it is so important to a Front Runner that you want to ensure you are likely to get it, and parent sparking is the best way to do that, and two, if you either can’t do that or need another option, swap out Riko for one of the above cards.

After that, Front Runner decks are pretty straightforward. You’ll want to have Riko in your flex slot, and then MLB Kitasan Black, another strong Speed Card (Silence Suzuka and Biko Pegasus are great options to run alongside Kitasan), and then two Wit Cards. If you happened to get it from the Halloween event, the Halloween Wit Mihono Borboun is a great option, and you could also go with Agnes Tachyon Wit or Matikanefukukitaru; Fuku’s card has some great general benefits from energy and skill point gains, while Agnes provides a lot of Medium skills. If you can, replacing either of your Wit cards with SSR Fine Motion is a great choice too, but that’s a lot of SSRs.

Pace Chaser Deck Suggestions

One of the best Speed Cards is this free Special Week card from the first event, and provides access to Gourmand.

If the fight for Front isn’t your bag, you can switch things up a little bit depending on what you have access to. Because Pace Chasers have access to Gourmand, one of the best Gold Recovery skills in the game that is not universal, you can sub out Power Rice Shower for SSR Speed Special Week to provide you Gourmand, which also means you could potentially use other Power Cards or other skill based cards that you’d like to include. Otherwise, there isn’t a lot of other things you need to worry about when it comes to changing up your deck from the above suggestions; Power El Condor Pasa is a good choice, though, if you do decide to swap out Rice Shower.

Late Surger and End Closer Options

A very solid Speed card in SR, Eishin Flash has numerous training events that restore your energy and mood, and provides decent skills for Late Surgers.

Much like Pace Chasers, Late Surgers and End Closer decks don’t change too much. You’ll want to pick support cards that provide beneficial skills based on the position to go in tandem with MLB Kitasan Black, and then fill in whatever gaps you may have or want. Unlike previous races, Straightaway Spurt is not as required/useful as it was in other races due to the way the racecourse is shaped, so you can instead focus on using cards like Eishin Flash or SSR Sweep Tosho, or even Zenno Rob Roy or Narita Taishin. Since Power is very helpful and especially so for the back track positions, running a Power card like Hishi Amazon, Bamboo Memory or Tamamo Cross are also really solid options.

Debuffers, If You’re Into That Sort of Thing

Debuffers are very popular in Global Umamusume, at least based on the data we’ve been able to see and gather from the previous races and general atmosphere of the game. Western players seem to love debuffing other players, and whether or not that is actually viable to getting wins or not, it is certainly something that many people like to do, so if you’re looking to run a Debuffer yourself, you need to make some changes to your deck compared to other trainees.

Firstly, it is important to remember that Debuffers are not running the race to win, they are running the race to kneecap other people. This means that you aren’t as concerned with things like running Riko, and instead running mostly what is known as “Guts/Wit”, which features decks that are heavily divided between Guts Cards and Wit Cards, making a trainee who has middling Speed, barely enough Stamina, mediocre Power, but very high Guts and Wit that allows them to survive most of the race and also ensure that their skills activate.

Cards like Grass Wonder, Air Groove, Nice Nature Guts, Rice Shower Stamina, Marvelous Sunday Wits, Nice Nature Wit, Agnes Tachyon, and Symboli Rudolf Wit are your best and likely most common choices for a Debuffer, and you may want to shoot for a deck that has 3 Guts and 3 Wit cards. Riko can be used in place of a Wit or Guts card if you want to ensure that you get some of her benefits which can help smooth out your scenario run, but that’s really up to you. Also, a Debuffer can be trained in URA Finale, if you find Unity Cup too difficult to get good results in, but you may be surprised at how well a Guts/Wit deck Debuffer can do in career mode based on how the game calculates certain things!

To a New Year of Umamusume

As 2025 comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for reading these articles and supporting our coverage of Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Horse racing and Umamusume have been something special to me and being able to talk about them in any capacity here on Goonhammer has really meant a lot to me, and I’m thankful that Rob let me take a crack at it and that you all have turned up to read and enjoy these articles. As we move in to 2026, a lot of the most exciting things to come in Umamusume are on the horizon (and also MANT, I guess), so I am really looking forward to continuing with you all on this journey through the accelerated global release schedule of Umamusume. Here’s to a new year of races, crash outs, and wacky shenanigans from the horse gals. 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, I’ll be training to hopefully see you all out there on the Tokyo Turf!

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