Now that Umamusume: Pretty Derby has been out for nearly a month, some of the initial hype of the game and its surprisingly deep management simulator has likely started to wear off, instead giving way to minor frustration in the form of not understanding what needs to be done to get better results, or the dreaded realization that the Umamusume you trained for Career mode is somehow not strong enough to clear even your daily races, failing to snag wins against other players in Team Races, and worst of all denying victory in Legend Races for that sweet trophy and bonus star rewards.
If you followed our guide on getting started with Career Mode, then the next step of your journey starts here: understanding Support Cards, how to build better Support Decks, and what to look for in order to help building stronger and stronger Umamusume as you also invariably try to create better Inheritance Sparks for your next round of trainees. In this article we’ll talk about what Support Cards actually do, why sometimes a Super Rare is better than a Super Secret Rare, and how to build ideal decks, as well as experimental decks, to help give you better results.
If you’re looking for help with Sparking for Inheritances after your great run using a brand new support deck, you can check it out here! And we also have a guide for PVP Mode to help give you targets on what types of decks to make, as well as a guide about Trainee Star and Potential Levels!
The Heart of the Support Cards
As we discussed in our Career mode overview, one of the things that often gets misunderstood about Umamusume: Pretty Derby is that the Umamusume themselves often do not have a lot of individual influence over your success or failure in a Career mode run or similar Race; by general standards, Umamusume have similar stats and starting places with only some variation, meaning that the divide in innate stats from a 1 Star and 3 Star Umamusume will be far smaller than you might expect. Innate and Unique skills also don’t make a huge difference, because the true deciding factor on whether or not your Umamusume can clinch a win boils down to their overall stats, and whether or not they meet minimum thresholds for performance at a given distance.
Another important note that helps lessen frustration if you have found your Career winning Umas not pulling their weight outside of the career mode itself is that Career mode gives a flat 400 point boost to all stats, meaning that the game pads your stat spread to help you complete the campaign (but, importantly, ALL Umas in career mode get this boost as well, if you are wondering why you can still have trouble winning). This often leads to a little bit of shock when your Gold Ship dominates her career run but then loses every Long race you put her on after the fact. There are other factors, such as the baseline RNG of the game, that can also lead to losing, so it’s important to recognize that even with perfect stats, your racer may just not win a race sometimes.
But often, guides or content creators will simply state numbers at you when trying to determine what you “need” or what you “want:” saying that “a Long racer needs 800 Stamina and Gold Heals at least” is not exactly a phrase that makes a lot of sense, even to moderately experienced players who have been playing since launch. How do you get that number, without seemingly losing out on all other stats? Well, this is where Support Cards come in. When starting a new Career run, players select two things that can vastly change the course of their campaign: Inheritances, and Support Cards. Inheritances are generally fairly easy to understand: you pick them based on stats, looking to fill in gaps in your training, but Support Cards can be a little more overwhelming at first.
Six Cards in the Chamber
Every Support Deck works functionally the same: players select five of their own cards, and one Guest card, which allows you to pick from cards that your Followed accounts have up for use, as well as a selection of random cards from other users that changes and can be refreshed. This means that support Decks are always 6 cards total, but you have to borrow one of them from someone else, meaning that you’ll either be borrowing specific cards, or have to search for cards that fill gaps in your own collection.
Support Cards come in three basic levels of quality: Rare (R), Super Rare (SR), and Super Secret Rare (SSR), which are also denoted by color, with R being Silver, SR being Gold, and SSR being Rainbow. Each Support Card also has the ability to be Uncapped, which is often called “LB” and “MLB” by the community, standing for “Limit Break” and “Max Limit Break”. When obtaining repeated copies of a Support Card, players can Uncap cards. Uncapping can be done 4 times per card, allowing you to increase the capabilities and bonuses of cards by combining multiple copies of the cards together. Generally, MLB cards are better than LB0 cards, and each copy of a card increases the quality of the card, meaning that if possible, you want to MLB cards you want to use in order to get the best possible outcomes from putting the card in your deck.
Support Cards also fall into categories divided by what statistic they benefit: Speed, Stamina, Power, Guts, and Wit. There is a final category, Friend, which isn’t attached to a specific statistic but instead offers benefits, such as helping moderate Moods and Energy for your trainee. The general and basic thought process is that you want the most cards in the stat you want the most of, but there are other things to consider as well.
Understanding Cards: A Beginner’s Intro
Aside from the categories and stats that cards interact with, there are other parts of the cards that can be hard to discern at first. Much like Career mode or even the game in general, there is a lot of information thrown at you and not always a lot of easy to parse ways of initially understanding Support cards. Cards start at level 1 and max out at level 50 when they are MLB, and levelling cards upgrades and unlocks effects and bonuses, increasing the amount of things cards do as well as increasing the percentage or amount those bonuses give. There are some flat benefits that cards give, such as starting stats, which will be denoted under their Support Effects. These can be big early boosts to your Career runs, and why stacking certain types of cards into your deck can lead to increased gains that can help a run get off to a great start. Other bonuses are often listed as percentages, imparting multiplicative bonuses to Training that are generally in three categories: Bonuses based on your Umamusume’s Mood, Friendship with a Support, and Training Effectiveness, which are also additive bonuses (meaning that these can all stack). Simply put, bigger numbers and bigger percentages are better, and the more of them you have available on a card, the better that card is.
Friend Cards are slightly different, as they do not generally impart stat bonuses, and instead affect things like Energy recovery, protect you against training Failure, or even increase the effectiveness of events related to those cards. Like regular Support Cards, the more bonuses a card offers, the better that card is going to be, however Friend cards do not stack (unlike stat based Support cards), so it’s often not worth bringing multiple Friend cards in a deck.
If you are a fairly new player, it’s important to remember that your collection of Support Cards is going to differ between your account and other’s accounts; you could even make different accounts and have completely different sets of cards, because the Support Card banner pulls are randomized, meaning that what cards you pull will depend on how often you can (or do) pull on them. While there are “meta” cards (we’ll talk about those a bit later), you really just want to try and amass a decent collection of cards to start out with, and know that getting multiple copies of an SR card can be a huge boost to your account over a single copy of an SSR. The longer you play, the more cards you will eventually be able to collect, and Story Mode and Events also give out free cards that are often surprisingly good, so there’s no reason to be discouraged from playing just because you didn’t pull an MLB Kitasan Black right out of the gate.
Anatomy of a Support Card
Let’s take a look at a card to get a better understanding of what the card offers and what you can expect it to do. For this example we’ll use the SSR Special Week Speed card, “The Setting Sun and Rising Stars”, but this breakdown applies to any support card you will come across. First, you’ll see the art of the card and the name; while this may seem obvious, it is very important to remember what Umamusume is attached to the card, because you cannot train an Umamusume in Career mode with cards that are named after them! This means that if we were to train any variation of Special Week in Career mode, we would be unable to use this card in our Support Deck.
After that, the Support Card will show you the Unique Perk that the Support Card gives. This is usually a “soft” target for a card in regards to Uncapping them, as it unlocks a specific and unique benefit the card will only give at that level; Special Week’s is at lvl 40, meaning that we would need the card to be LB2, which raises the max level of the card from 30 to 40. Generally these unique perks are very simple, doing exactly what they say, so there’s not a ton of mystery there.
After that, all Support Cards start by listing their Support Effects. This is the part of cards that people often miss or don’t read closely enough, and in large part can help determine the difference between a very good card that will help you get what you want, and a card that may only give you minor benefits (or worse, benefits you don’t want). As shown below, we see that the benefits we gain from this card give us 35% Friendship Bonus to our training if we have a training event with this card, a 30% Mood Effect to our mood’s impact on our training, an extra flat Speed Bonus attached to Speed training, an initial 10 points to our Friendship Gauge with Special Week, a Race Bonus of 5% increase to stats gained from wins, and a 10% Race Bonus to increase fans gained from races. Finally, the Specialty Priority of 30 denotes how often Special Week is likely to appear in Speed training, which here roughly means Special Week will roughly appear in Speed training opportunities ⅓ of the time.
If we were to compare this to a different card, the SR Narita Taishin Speed card “Poolside High Tides”, we see that there is indeed some variety in bonuses and levels. Narita Taishin only gives us 20% Friendship Bonus, but imparts 10% Training Effectiveness, which Special Week doesn’t provide. Importantly, Narita Taishin also imparts a flat 20 to our Speed Stat if we select her, which can be a big boost to early training cycles and help us hit a training goal with what is effectively a 1 time free LVL 3 Speed training. In a deck focused on Speed, both of these would be great choices, but if selection were restricted, the choice would fall to the user to debate which card provides better long lasting results for a Career run, which sometimes falls to the next category on a card we need to cover: Skills.
Skill Issue? No Sir, I’m Subscribed
Skills are initially a bit of a mystery to new players, as the game does not inherently explain where or how Umamusume get them from. Each Umamusume comes with a set of innate skills, which is often a combination of a Unique Skill (their “Ult” or “Special Move”), and a collection of abilities that are often related to their Running Style, Distance, or innate personalities. For example, Makitanefukukitaru has a few skills related to “lucky” things happening, due to the Umamusume’s gimmick of caring about fortune telling and divine intervention. However, the only two ways to learn skills that are not inherently defined by the Umamusume come from two places, once again set by the beginning of a Career: Inheritance Sparks, and Support Decks. Inheritance Sparks often enable Umamusume to pass on skills they learned in their own Career runs, and can be ways of passing a Unique skill (at a lower level) to another Umamusume, while other skills often have a somewhat random chance of being inherited.
This means that Support Decks are often the best way to specifically manage and navigate the types of skills that an Umamusume may have a chance of learning. And it is very important to stress “may learn”, because skills are unlocked through Support interactions, meaning that if you never meaningfully interact with a Support, you won’t unlock the ability to learn the skill. Like many things in Umamusume, however, it is also important to note that you may still not unlock a skill to learn due to RNG and the course of your campaign.
Each card has a unique set of skills, which are again often tailored to the type of Umamusume that they are based on. Narita Taishin’s card, “Poolside High Tides”, offers skills that benefit End Closer running styles, as she is an End Closer herself. In comparison, Special Week’s card, “The Setting Sun and Rising Stars”, focuses on skills that are beneficial to Late Surger running style. This means that when selecting cards for your Deck, you may need to make choices based not just on the benefits the card gives to your training and stats, but also to the skills you may get a chance of learning; while Narita Taishin’s 20 Speed is great, if your racer is not an End Closer, you may find that most of her benefits other than raising your stats fall a bit flat.
Building Your Support Deck and Experimenting
When it comes to building a Support Deck, a fairly popular set of ratios in the community are 4:2, 3:2:1, or 2:2:2. As we mentioned in our getting started article about Career Mode, the most important stat in the game generally is Speed, meaning that oftentimes a 4:2 ratio is either 4 Speed Cards and 2 other important stats, or 4 of an important stat and 2 Speed. You can also try combos like 3:3, sometimes working with what you have versus what you can ideally use; for example, this Matikanefukukitaru I raised has fairly impressive stats and does very well as my Long racer, but I was limited by running out of resources to level my Mayano Top Gun SR card to max level, and lacking a fourth Stamina card I would prefer to use instead of Special Week or Narita Taishin.
Working on your Support Deck also helps foster better understanding of the game in terms of what you “need” to do in order to train more successful Umamusume, and importantly, start working towards better Inheritance Sparks for yourself and for others to borrow. A general threshold is that 600 in a Stat increases your chances of creating a Spark for that stat after your Career is over. This is not guaranteed, and Spark farming requires effort and patience, but 600 is a fairly good target to hit for most stats that are not your ‘priority’ stat. The deciding factor on what that Stat is falls to the type of racer and distance you are working on, primarily at this stage of the game being Speed, Stamina, or Power. Future Career Scenarios will change up what cards you want to prioritize (and will eventually see the importance of Guts cards!), but right now in the URA Finale stage, Speed, Stamina, and Power are kings of the track.
As the ratios imply, the more of a certain type of stat card you use, the more often you are to encounter that friend in training and benefit from the multipliers and bonuses they offer. Combining this with inheriting your secondary stat priority is what makes reaching goals like 1000+ in a Stat possible while ensuring that your other stats are not anemic. When training, Friend supports are denoted by icons in the right side of the screen; as their friendship gauges increase from Blue to Orange, you unlock “Rainbow Training”, which will impart massive bonuses to your training routine in that Stat. The more Friends you have maxed that appear in a training, the more those bonuses multiply, meaning that a 4 Speed deck with 4 maxed Friends in training can hit +100 to Speed off of a training session late game.
When setting training goals for yourself and as you learn the game more, discerning what stat you need to focus on to get the result you want can become easier, but generally, most Umamusume want around 300-400 Wit to help skills activate more consistently, aiming for 1200 in the stat you want the most of (Speed for Sprinters or Milers, Stamina for Middle and Long racers), and then either Speed for Longer races or Power for shorter ones. With some practice and familiarity, you can start hitting these goals more consistently and notice vast improvement in your racer’s performance both in Career mode and outside of it. Of course, feel free to experiment with deck building, just so you can see how things turn out, and also get a better sense of how training events and friendship building work in the game.
Final Note: Super Creek and Kitasan Black
In last week’s article, I mentioned that new player may wish to reroll accounts to obtain copies of the SSR cards Super Creek, Fine Motion, or the (now available) Kitasan Black. Although briefly explaining why in that article, I wanted to spend a little time discussing them here, and why they are so ubiquitous when it comes to Support Deck use, as well as trying to put some of what I call “Kitasan Black Hysteria” to rest. Firstly, the main reason these two cards are talked about so frequently comes from the “foreknowledge” of Japanese version players, who have seen the game evolve from release to current state, deeming both of these cards “meta” or “S tier” in the English release of the game. While it is true that these cards are very good, they are very good for reasons that may not matter to your enjoyment of the game, and also can be supplemented for in various ways.
First, Super Creek. Super Creek’s SSR card, “Piece of Mind”, is a Stamina card that somewhat breaks the mold for advice: you select Super Creek entirely for her skill offerings, and primarily for the Skill “Swinging Maestro”, known as a Gold skill. “Swinging Maestro” is an evolution of the White skill Corner Recovery, which recovers Stamina on corners. Assuming you have the Wit to get your skills to activate, each race has at least 3 chances (and sometimes more, in Long races with laps) to activate Swinging Maestro, as it activates during corners rather than on straightaways. Swinging Maestro is also a Gold skill, meaning it restores far more Stamina than the White version Corner Recovery, which is governed by your Stamina stat: the more Stamina you have, the more you recover, meaning that Long racers with high Stamina and Swinging Maestro, such as the Matikanefukukitaru or Anime McQueen shown here, are unlikely to lose a race due to running out of Stamina (which, if you recall, is basically your HP).
Super Creek is a card that isn’t going anywhere, and is also a card that many players have, so borrowing one is always a very easy option if you don’t have one yourself. While that means you may have to rely on borrowing her “all the time”, her skill is so ubiquitous that having her in your deck, and if you do happen to have a copy of Super Creek, an LB0 or even LB1 version of her card is more than enough to be considered good for what you need.
As for Kitasan Black, much of the hype, or hysteria, around this card’s release has to do with the longevity of the card in the meta. It is true that and MLB or LB3 Kitasan Black SSR “Fire at My Heels” is an incredibly good Speed card for a few reasons: it has very fast Friendship training maxing, meaning you get Rainbows very early, it has good skills, offers a bonus to raising your Power, and is generally just the “best” Speed card you can get. The big caveats here is that you need to pull at LEAST 4 copies of this card, which is already an SSR, and has a very low chance of realistically happening without spending a lot of money, and even more so to get 5 copies.
I saw a lot of conversational griping and doomposting on social media over Kitasan Black’s release and people bemoaning that they are “quitting” or giving up on the game, or that they would reroll their entire accounts for this card. I want to try and put a little context on this: you do not NEED this card to play Umamusume: Pretty Derby, and you also do not NEED this card to play at high level PVP in Team Trials. For one, you can borrow the card if you want to, as many people have various copies and versions of it out there. For two, there are just other cards, such as SSR Biko Pegasus “Double Carrot Punch!” offers very similar benefits, and can supplement as a very good Speed card without Kitasan Black.
I think that focusing too heavily on “I need this card or I suck at the game” or “Without this card, I guess I can’t be good at Umamusume: Pretty Derby” skews the game into something it isn’t. Support Cards are important, but no one Support Card will make or break your account, and we are not even an entire month into the game’s release; there will be many, many more Support Cards, many more updates to the game, and new Scenarios that will ask for new strategies. Focus on building decks and learning how the game works, and you’ll have endless fun with it; don’t worry so much about “meta” cards, especially when you can borrow them!
Cheering From the Stands
With this guide, hopefully the mystery of Support Cards is a little easier to understand. There is far more under the hood of Umamusume: Pretty Derby than it initially seems, and while mastering the Career loop and understanding the flow of the game will vastly improve your experience, better understanding of the Support Card deck and what the cards do will see marked improvement in your runs overall, as will expanding your support card collection. From my first week and a half with the game to my third week when my support card binder expanded exponentially, I saw immediate improvements to my racers and their overall training, and I’m currently producing some of the best quality Umas of my entire career now. With a little bit of practice, you too can start training up Umas that will help you easily clinch the URA Finale trophy and provide you solid Inheritance Sparks, PVP capabilities, and winning racers for Legend Races and beyond!
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