The Best Trainees for the Leo Cup in Umamusume: Pretty Derby

There is still some time to prep trainees for the Leo Cup, which will kick off soon during the Half Anniversary celebration that’s going on at the same time, making it a great time to either get down to business on training, get back into the game, or start the game if you haven’t already dipped your toes into Umamusume: Pretty Derby. The arrival of Half Anniversary and Leo Cup also means that the new scenario is on the horizon, meaning that there’s about to be a lot of great reasons to check the game out and consider trying PVP for the first time if you haven’t already.

If you’ve been following along with our guides so far, though, this guide is going to be helping you settle into which trainees are your best bets for the Leo Cup, ranging from luxury picks from new banners, free three star selector tickets, or limited options for players with limited pools of trainees; regardless of what type of player you are, there’s a lot of great options available to you for trainee selection in Leo Cup. If you’d like to check out our previous guides, we touched on the Leo Cup itself, what Support Cards are good for it, and if you’re very new to Umamusume, we have a slew of guides ranging from Career Mode, Support Decks, Inheritances, and many more that you can check out to hit the ground running.

Leo Cup Refresher: The Basics

The Leo Cup is a Medium Distance race at 2200m, run on Hanshin Turf in Summer with Sunny Conditions and Firm turf during Summer from the Right-hand side using the Inner posts. The most important thing there is Medium Distance, which those of you who have been playing or training since the Taurus Cup may recognize is a very wide field of possible trainees; many Umas can run Medium at A ranking naturally, and even more can run it at A with a single inheritance from B to A, which means that there are very few competitors who can’t work in this race, although some are going to be better than others.

Another big chance since the Taurus Cup is the appearance of Seiun Sky and Summer Maruzensky, who shifted the meta of the Cancer Cup and are going to have a big impact on Champion’s Meetings for a long time to come; while some of the previous races favored Late Surgers and End Closers, the two Front Runners have made them very meta and quite strong in terms of how PVP races are run and influenced. That means that you’ll also be able to run just about any style you like, as almost all positions have deeply competitive options, rather than the preponderance of Late Surger and End Closers that dominated the first few Champion’s Meetings.

The New Era: Front Runners

Due to Seiun Sky and Summer Maruzensky (Otherwise known as Hot Summer Night Maruzensky), Front Runners are an imposing and dominating factor in Champion’s Meetings for quite a while, and shift the overall meta to revolve somewhat around them. Even if you aren’t able to run one of them, you can still formulate a competitive and strong Front Runner of your own as long as they are able to inherit Seiun Sky’s unique, Angling and Scheming, and learn the skill Groundwork (along with the requisite number of green skills that support it activating). If possible, a trainee that can inherit both Seiun Sky and Summer Maruzensky is even better, but that would imply you own one or the other, and would be likely better off training one of them instead of trying to create some sort of proxy runner or frankenstein.

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

If you’re looking to put a Front Runner into competition, these are the following recommendations based on what type of player you are.

Free to Play

If you’re a Free to Play player of Umamusume: Pretty Derby and have never pulled for trainees the entire time you’ve been playing, aside from saluting your overall fortitude in the game, I will give you some commiseration that you have only one real option for a Front Runner for the Leo Cup: Daiwa Scarlet (and you will likely want to try and get her to Star Level 3, but this might be very difficult if you never pull on banners). Daiwa can be a competitive and strong Front Runner if she inherit the unique of Seiun Sky and learns Groundwork, and you don’t need to invest much into her Potential Levels because her Potential Level unlocks all focus on Pace Chaser skills. Her Unique, Resplendent Red Ace, is quite powerful and with Angling and Scheming will present a very solid option for a Front Runner that can compete with other challengers quite easily. Mayano does get access to Breath of Fresh Air at Potential Level 3, which is a very solid Gold Recovery choice if you’d like one, and Potential Level 3 is quite easy to achieve without too much investment. As for Skills, Mayano will want her unique leveled, and to again inherit Angling and Scheming.

Casual Rolls / Free to Play with Rolls

Mayano Top Gun can perform well as either a Front Runner or an End Closer, if you inherit that style.

If you’re a fairly casual player who has rolled for some trainees, then you do have another option: Mayano Top Gun, who can also provide a strong Front Runner Ace option. Sadly this particular race is very heavily leaning towards 3 star trainees for Front Runner, so if you’re determined to run one in that position and you only have access to a few rolls worth of choices, Daiwa Scarlet and Mayano are your best bets.

Luxury Choices

While these don’t require a player to be a whale, this category is mostly speaking to players who have made it a mission to have access to certain trainees, or even specific trainees that required fairly large investments of rolls to obtain. This category has access to the strongest trainees (on paper) in Front Runner: Summer Maruzensky, Seiun Sky, and Wedding Mayano Top Gun. Wedding Mayano Top Gun is kind of a dark horse in this category, and so if you happened to have her from the event a few months back, she can be a highly competitive Front Runner (once again with Seiun Sky’s unique), and frankly any of the three here are great choices. If anything, Seiun Sky is perhaps the “weakest” of the options here, as Maruzensky and Mayano inheriting Seiun Sky’s unique are almost better off than Seiun Sky is with her own ability. Some other options include Smart Falcon or Mihono Bourbon, but neither of them are exceptional in this race; if you have them and no one else, though, you can certainly give them a shot.

Use of the Selector Tickets / Some 3 Stars

If you used the free selector ticket and have done some pulls and obtained a few 3 Star trainees, then… sadly, there’s not much you can do here; there are no really great trainees available to this category, ironically making it worse off than F2P or Casual Rolls, and you’re better off running different Styles. However, if you are committed to it and have access to her, Silence Suzuka is your best option here.

Pacing Along

Because Front Runners will receive so much attention, it may not surprise you to discover that Pace Chaser is the second most competitive Style in the Leo Cup; since the Style is based entirely on surging late in the race to pass the Front Runners, training a Pace Chaser to surpass the Front Runners looking to blow out a win with Angling and Scheming can truly surprise people who thought they had the race in the bag. Pace Chasers don’t have quite a ubiquitous skill that they’ll all want to inherit like Front Runners who want to get Angling and Scheming, but most of them will want to obtain Triumphant Pulse from Oguri Cap and/or regular Maruzensky’s Red Shift/LP1211-M skills, which can help a Pace Chaser blow ahead of the competition at the end of the race on the last corner and in the final straight.

Free to Play

No, you’re not seeing a repeat: If you’re a Free to Play player, your best bet in this position is Daiwa Scarlet once again. If you prefer to run her as a Pace Chaser and not a Front Runner, you will need to invest into her Potential Levels quite a bit to unlock more skills, specifically the recovery skill Race Planner, which does make her a fairly high ‘investment’ ceiling for a free character that some of the other options don’t have. That being said, if you are limited to a F2P roster, you likely will have the materials to make Daiwa potential 5 without it being much of a problem to your overall account economy.

Casual Rolls / Free to Play with Rolls

Agnes Tachyon is another easily obtained option whose innate healing can make her a good pick.

If you've done a few rolls, then you could also work with Agnes Tachyon, who has one of the best unique recovery skills in the game. The biggest issue with Agnes is that she has no inherent acceleration/velocity skills, so you’ll need to supplement her inherent recovery ability with skills that will ensure she has speed and power to challenge other racers; that said, she can also easily win against players who aren’t prepared with proper recovery, but you do absolutely need speed skills to compensate. You will also want to have her at Star Level 3 so that her Unique is upgraded to the far superior U=ma2, and she also gets access to Race Planner at Potential Level 5, which means that Agnes comes with 2 gold recovery skills (And thus doesn’t have to rely on Swinging Maestro like other trainees). Some other great options here include El Condor Pasa or Sakura Bakushin O (who can also work as a Front Runner but probably wants to go Pace here).

Use of the Selector Tickets / Some 3 Stars

Oguri Cap is considered one of the best all rounder trainees, and it isn't hard to see why: she can run almost any distance and track.

Depending on what 3 Stars you received from early pulls or if you have the Selector Ticket available, you get the option to select 2 very strong contenders in Pace Chaser: Oguri Cap and Special Week. Of the two of them Oguri Cap is the superior choice (as Triumphant Pulse is an amazing ability) due to how useful she is in almost any distance and any style of race, both as a trainee and as a parent. There are a lot of reasons why Oguri Cap is the best choice for your Ticket use, but if you have Special Week, she can also be highly competitive and strong in the Leo Cup.

Luxury Choices

You of course pulled for Meisho Doto, right?

Perhaps surprisingly, there aren’t that many Luxury choices here, but if you, like me, are cultured, you probably spent your Carats recently pulling for Meisho Doto, who is a great choice for Pace Chaser in the Leo Cup. Your other option here is Narita Brian, who is pretty cool (But not as cool as Meisho Doto), but in either case, these two make for great choices if you’d like to compete in Pace Chaser and happen to have access to the two trainees. Both versions of Mejiro McQueen and Tokai Teio work here, as does Fuji Kiseki.

Late Surger and End Closer Options

While much of the competition will focus on the Front of the race, there are certainly some great options for playing back field.

Free to Play

Gold Ship remains an incredibly strong pick, but top tier performance requires her to be at Potential 5.

Unsurprisingly to those who competed in previous Champion’s Meetings, a few names are going to seem very familiar here, chief amongst those being Gold Ship. Potential 5 Gold Ship remains one of the best Late Surgers in the game, and as a Free to Play Unit, she’s also the most widely available unit that remains competitive in almost every single PVP race in the game. Aside from Gold Ship, Vodka is also a fairly good option here, and certainly worth considering utilizing if you are sticking to the base roster for your trainees. You’ll want both Gold Ship and Vodka at Star Level 3, and Gold Ship especially at Potential Level 5, but in either case these are great options for back field play.

Casual Rolls / Free to Play with Rolls

If you’re a fairly casual player, you still have some great options available: Super Creek, Matikanefukukitaru, and Winning Ticket are all trainees that you can obtain easily and train for the race if you prefer playing further back. Of them, it is important to note that Super Creek wants to be Potential Level 5 so she has innate access to Swinging Maestro on top of her unique recovery, since she can’t learn the skill otherwise (and there’s no other particularly great Gold Recovery that replaces it). The other two are mostly personal preference; while Matikanefukukitaru’s unique doesn’t always seem that particularly great, her ability to get better positioning can be very helpful since there will be a solid chance that the bulk of competitors will be in front of her and block her way. A final option is Mejiro Ryan, although in many cases you may wish to have your trainee inherit Ryan’s Let’s Pump Some Muscle instead of train Ryan yourself, but that’s mostly a matter of preference and taste!

Use of the Selector Tickets / Some 3 Stars

With access to the pool of trainees from the selector ticket, Oguri Cap remains a great pick (she can run either Pace or Late), but now you can also consider Symboli Rudolf if you would like. There aren’t many other options here (although you could also try Special Week as a Late Surger).

Luxury Choices

If your collection of trainees happens to dip into having a broader access than not, your Late Surger and End Closer options do have a few other choices, but not many. Primarily, this group gives you access to Fantasy Grass Wonder, Hishi Amazon, the upcoming Eishin Flash, and the best option, Narita Taishin, as well as Wedding Mayano Top Gun. Narita Taishin works functionally the same was as she did in the previous races, but this time she is unlikely to be denied the ability to utilize her skill Sleeping Lion due to the fact that there will be so many Front Runners who are actually going to compete, rather than be utilized to debuff abilities.

Wedding Mayano Top Gun is unique because her skill activates either when she is in front OR in the back, so which position you’d like her to be in will depend on how you prefer to train her, but you can absolutely train her to be a successful Front Runner or End Closer (although she needs to inherit End Closer A). It can certainly catch people by surprise when it does happen, so don’t underestimate the possibility of using her unique’s special activation conditions.

Debuff or Not to Debuff

Perhaps something that Global Players have adopted far more than almost any other aspect of the Champion’s Meeting meta discussions from Japanese running of the events is that Global Players seem to very much love running Debuffers. This is a risky option because it means that one of your three trainees is essentially not meant to win the race, but instead is meant to make it harder for other trainees to win while your Ace tries to take the gold.

The problem is that since so many people run Debuffers, there are ways to know how to counter them, specifically just by ensuring your trainee exceeds stamina requirements and has plenty of recovery, and also to utilize speed/acceleration skills to make up for any loss of competitive ability. Once that’s done, a team of 3 competent racers against a team with 1 ace and 2 debuffers will often win against the debuffers, because the enemy player is putting all their hopes on a single trainee.

That being said, if you’re interested in running a Debuffer, the best options include the ubiquitous Nice Nature, Agnes Tachyon, Grass Wonder, Symboli Rudolf, Wedding Mayano Top Gun, and Air Groove. Something to note about these trainees is that there really aren’t many free to play options; even the most common options here require you to have done a few pulls at some point in the game to obtain more trainees.

Of them, Nice Nature remains the best choice. If for some reason you don’t have access to her, however, the others can absolutely make for great picks, and a Debuff Agnes Tachyon can also remain fairly competitive due to her ability to get numerous debuff skills and carry her own unique recovery skill to help her out in learning various skills.

New Scenario on the Horizon

Although the Leo Cup is certainly the focus of competitive play, there is other news to keep in mind for Umamusume’s near future: the arrival of the second major story scenario, Aoharu, which will provide new opportunities to train your racers and free you from the constant cycle of URA Finale runs. There are a few other things to be excited for in the meantime, primarily the Half Year Anniversary bonuses that will be given on log-in, including 100 free pulls for Support Cards.

Although there hasn’t been a date released yet, the scenario will likely arrive early to mid November, and something that was hinted at possibly (but not confirmed) coming is the arrival of Auto mode for trainees in campaigns. If you’ve begun to burn out on running careers over and over again, then Auto mode is going to be a huge improvement to the general quality of life for the Umamusume game experience; for the most part, it will make running events easier and easier to earn the 400k points required for MLB cards, and it will also help automate runs to train parents and fish for sparks and inheritances. You’ll still need to play the game actively to train aces, but just lowering the feeling of grinding from the game will absolutely shoot new life into the experience if you’ve been finding it a struggle.

For now, good luck in the Leo Cup! 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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Tags: umamusume | Uma Musume Pretty Derby