What You Need to Know About Trackblazer in Umamusume Pretty Derby

Cygames recently announced that the third scenario in Umamusume: Pretty Derby is on the horizon, named Trackblazer: Start of the Climax, renamed from the original Japanese title Make a New Track. If you’ve been following our guides and keeping up with the game, you may have heard about MANT before, often talked about in somewhat excited whispers and dreaded tones due to the way in which it changes the scenarios of Umamusume far more broadly than Unity Cup did. There’s a lot of new information to digest on what will become the standard for training your newest Aces for Team Trials and Champions Meetings, so this week we’ll be diving in to what exactly changes in Trackblazer, how that affects what you’ll need to do, as well as preparing you for some of the changes that have made this one of the most notoriously divisive scenarios in the game’s history.

If you are fairly new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we have quite a few other articles that you may want to take a look at before this one! We’ve covered Career mode, Support Decks, Inheritances, and PVP, and you can find all of that coverage and more throughout our site as the “first year” of Umamusume Global roars onward. Trackblazer will put a lot of that knowledge to the test, as well as change some fundamentals of what Careers mean, so knowing how the game works at a basic level will certainly help you in the rush of new information and challenges that this scenario will bring to the game.

Career Mode Refresher

In Career Mode, you'll see your racer's current stats, as well as their energy, upcoming goals, mood, and other options to help plan out your next steps.

Career Mode is the primary way in which you create new trainees in Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Up until Trackblazer, that has been through the URA Finale and Unity Cup Scenarios, both of which blend a personal story of your trainee into an overarching narrative. The process is generally the same for all Careers: You select a trainee, 2 parent cards, and a deck of 6 Support Cards that will provide various training bonuses, events, and skill hints that your trainee can encounter throughout the career itself.

Generally, what Support Cards you take don’t always inherently matter, but some Scenarios have decidedly better cards than others; for example, Unity Cup really wanted players to utilize Riko Kashimoto’s cards, and other cards could have minor buffs or changes to the career from their presence. Trackblazer is a little similar, but also slightly different in how and why, which we’ll cover in a bit. The biggest thing to remember is that your Support Deck really determines what skills you gain access to through events in your careers, as well as training bonuses and starting bonuses from various cards. Often, newer players will need to stack certain stats higher than others in order to ensure they’re getting what they need, but more experienced players with more developed Support Cards can often cut down on stacking 3 or 4 Speed to take advantage of the higher benefits of MLB cards.

All Careers run a set amount of turns that culminate in a final race, and at the end of a Career, whether you are successful or not, your Trainee is added to your Veteran roster and becomes eligible to be a Parent, run in Team Trials, complete Daily Races, and also participate in Champions Meeting PVP, which is primarily the goal of training “ace” runners that are the star of your roster. Parents are generally trained up for the Sparks, and you can actually do that quite easily through the URA Scenario as it is fast and parent stats don’t matter quite as much as they do for anything else; otherwise, anything you’re looking to do competitively will always want to be run in the newest Scenario until it is eventually replaced by the next one. Since Global is on an accelerated timetable, it is also worth considering that these Scenarios both come a lot faster than they did in Japan, and also that they don’t last quite as long. While Riko Kashimoto was an important card for Unity Cup, she serves no real purpose in Trackblazer, meaning that her lifetime as a useful card was incredibly short compared to what JPN players had. This is worth considering if you’re worried about Meta chasing or card longevity; cards that are good for single Scenarios will have a considerably shorter lifespan in Global than they did normally, but they also tend to be so important because of what they offered in that Scenario.

Racing to the Finish: Trackblazer Scenario

Perhaps the first thing most players will notice when they try to begin their career modes is that Trackblazer focuses entirely on racing, and that means that certain things are gone; you’ll no longer see individualized events during your Trackblazer scenario runs, and even events like Valentines Day don’t occur while you’re in this scenario. This can have some direct benefits, as you’ll avoid mandatory negative training events like those that afflict Narita Taishin Meisho Doto, or Mejiro Ardan, but you also won’t get positive ones either, as everything in Trackblazer is about racing, racing, and more racing. This Scenario is also infamous for being the Era of Oguri Cap (Both versions) due to her viability in so many different races and with the ability to avoid race fatigue making her a viable Ace in many Champions Meetings, as well as just a workhorse for clearing the Scenario for event points.

Trackblazer relies on players gathering what are known as Grand Points (GP) in the Japanese version, although what that will be called in the Global version remains to be scene (although it will likely not be that different). GP replaces almost all other types of deadlines or goals from previous Scenarios and Campaigns; for example, Haru Urara, who has numerous fan checkpoints, instead has GP requirements, as do trainees who have specific races they needed to clear or challenge. This also impacts Unique Skill levels, so instead of specific amounts of fans by Valentines, Fan Meeting, and Christmas, trainees now require specific bond levels with Chairwoman Akikawa.

Make a New Track is the Japanese name for Trackblazer, so if you see people talk about it, that's what they mean.

Right away, it may seem that this Scenario is far less individual than the previous ones, and that’s generally true, because your Trainees individual stories are not part of Trackblazer. As you may guess, this is also why the Scenario had such a polarizing effect on fans, because it didn’t really matter who you trained; everyone has the same Scenario, and there’s really not very much different between them. As far as gameplay is concerned, you are primarily going to follow a similar pattern to previous Careers, in which you spend your days not racing training at the various Stat pools. Like URA Finale, training in them more often increases their level, but another mechanic affects this also, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

The finale of Trackblazer replaces the URA Finale with another three tiered race, originally called the Twinkle Star Series in Japan, which works off a points System. This means that your trainee just needs the most points, although coming in first does confer that; still, you can clear your Scenario even if you don’t win all 3 races, just as long as you have the most points out of all the other competitors in the races. Aside from the lack of training events, the scenario does work primarily the same as the others, so the flow is pretty similar: You get 3 years worth of trainings to complete your goals, try your hand at the finale, and look to be the victor before retiring your trainee and going again.

Shopping Trips

The biggest change to the game is the Shop, which features heavily in how Trackblazer works. Since there are no career events or storylines relating to your trainee, the reality is that you do very little but train, race, and repeat. To spice things up a bit, there is a Shop that becomes available that lets you use Coins (not Monies, the general currency of the game, but Coins you earn from racing) that lets you buy everything from stat up items to ailment cures to even entire levels on a training facility. The shop is the real meat of Trackblazer, where good shop items and proper economic management can really build a stellar trainee through buying the right items at the right time.

This also means that you need to maximize your racing, and the best way to do that is to race in competitions you know you are going to win, but also bringing along Support Cards that benefit you with Racing Bonuses. This is why, depending on what you’ve heard so far, that Kitasan Black temporarily drops from being the most valuable card in the game; while her kit is still good, she doesn’t offer much in the way of Racing Bonuses, and that is the primary mechanic behind Trackblazer and building a good trainee. Properly ensuring that you get the right items will not only give you good flat benefits, but can also really make or break a training run if you don’t waste your Coins on useless things. You can also cure ailments, and event restore energy, as well as ensure that you get more out of your training for a single turn for the cost of more energy.

A very solid card for Trackblazer, and one you can use instead of or seek out instead of Kitasan Black MLB.

Shopping isn’t really as “fun” as the career choices and options, but it is unique, and does make the Trackblazer scenario work very different, so learning how to properly use the shop and benefit from it is a major key to victory and also to training up superior aces. As the stat cap changes quite a bit in Trackblazer (or at least, it did in Japan), it will also be important to note that 1200 won’t be the max stat across the board; in Japan, the stats for Stamina changed to 1900 instead of 1200, and Wit rose to 1500, so it remains to be seen how Trackblazer handles that when we receive the mode in Global. The main reason I mention “remains to be seen” is that Unity cup also had, or should have had, changed Stats, but that really didn’t manifest in the Global Release. Instead, we got the Balance update in November that greatly changed the way many skills worked, but so far we haven’t seen much change in the realm of Stats yet. If it doesn’t change, it will remain to be seen what Global trainees look like with Trackblazer stat growths if everything remains at 1200; I have to admit that the PVP scene will be pretty scary if most competitors are easily reaching the caps!

A Less Fun Story but More Racing

Perhaps you may tell from the tone, but Trackblazer/MANT does have a little bit of a “no fun” air to it, and that’s primarily because you don’t see your Trainee’s personal story during it. If you’re a new player or obtained a new trainee for the first time after Trackblazer comes out, you’ll likely want to play through URA or Unity Cup to actually see their Career storylines, and then Trackblazer to raise them into Ace competitors. That doesn’t mean that Trackblazer isn’t fun, though, and the focus on racing does change up the flavor and style of the game enough that can help if you’ve had a little fatigue running the same careers over and over and seeing the same events over and over (especially when you know it’s a detrimental one you can’t avoid). Trackblazer does have some baggage from the Japanese reception, so I’d also caution to not take things so word of gospel from other content creators or players, because while Trackblazer may be less “fun”, we’ll also have it for far less time, and that means we can enjoy it and appreciate it before moving on to the next Scenario. It will also be primarily how you train people for PVP, so unless you plan on taking an extended break, you’ll need to get used it it! Until Trackblazer launches, 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