As the second month of service begins to dawn on Umamusume: Pretty Derby, there is certainly a question of what to do next; by now, established players have likely run quite a few Career Mode runs, worked on leveling their Veteran Umamusume’s Potential and Stars and even possibly crafted a quality Support Deck and even collected useful Sparks for smoother runs. While the next scenario is likely quite a bit of time away, the first major player event in Umamusume is coming later this month: The Taurus Cup, a 2400m race in which players will be able to pit their own racers against teams of three for glory, fame, and best of all, exclusive and lucrative in-game rewards. While some players may be familiar with the light player versus player mode of Team Races, Champions Meetings are the true PVP events that present creative challenges to players.
If you’re not familiar with PVP in Umamusume, or looking to get help preparing a team for the Champions Meet, then this guide is for you; at the time of publication, the Champions Meet will be a few weeks away, giving you plenty of time to get established and try your best to compete in the Taurus Cup. If you’ve encountered this after the Taurus Cup, then that’s okay: we’ll still cover how PVP works, things to consider, how to approach building a team for it, and how Team Matches can help you practice for Champions Meets in the future.
Racing for Fun and Profit
Team Matches are the first place most players encounter PVP in Umamusume, as the feature is part of player’s daily quests. Team Matches allow you to place your racers up against a team of other racers, offering you an “Easy, Medium, Hard” option for opponents whose team score is either lower, on par, or above your own. At first, players are only able to field one racer per race type, covering every distance available in the game: Sprint, Mile, Medium, and Long, as well as a fifth category devoted specifically to Dirt races (which are also Sprints). This means that even if a player never pulls for more Umamusume, they will always have 5 racers who can race in every category from the basic starter group you have, but the more Umamusume you obtain, the more racers you can field, finally stopping at 3 racers per race category.
Most players would be forgiven for not giving this mode a lot of attention; you can easily complete your dailies by simply doing a single race, mashing ‘view results’, and not caring if you win or lose. However, as players unlock more slots, the races can become far more challenging and competitive, and the rewards far more lucrative. New players start out at the bottom tier, and during a monthly cycle can try to rank up; each promotion gifts a hefty amount of Carats, often enough for a 10 pull, and retaining your rank also grants bonuses that are worth keeping.
A hidden benefit of Team Mode is to help practice for other types of PVP; the races are static, divided by length, but each track is the same, meaning that you can begin raising racers specifically to conquer Team Races by noting the types of races you encounter by distance, conditions, weather, and more (and you can even adjust the weather with consumables). Often after completing a Career the game will ask if you want to edit your team, which allows you to add your newly finished veteran; this isn’t always the best option however.
One thing to note about the Umamusume engine is that it often makes very poor decisions for “auto” selections, and Team Races is yet another way this works. Early on you may not care as you only have so many racers, but as you begin to build a bigger stable, you’ll want to start manually placing Umas into the categories and lengths you specifically want them in. It can also be important to slightly ignore your ‘power level’, as the game makes this number up somewhat arbitrarily, and you can get better results by placing horses in the categories they need to be in.
Building a Team
Unlike Career, your Veteran Umamusume will not change from the status they are when you end their Career; that means that whatever stats or skills they have when you finish is what they have, and you can only change that by redoing career and trying to train a new version of that racer. The more important thing to consider when it comes to Team Races is building a team of three racers that help cover specific aspects of the races and what you need them to do; this is where the style of racer you select matters. As we discussed in previous guides, racers prefer specific styles, ranging from Front Runner, Pace Chaser, Late Surger, and End Closer. A fairly good strategy to employ for Teams is to try and cover Front Runner, Pace Chaser, and one of the “end” positions, either Late Surger or End Closer.
Selecting a Front Runner is important because Front Runners set the pace of the entire race. Having a competitive Front Runner who can stay in front of the other races not only bends the race to their own whims, but also prevents other Front Runners from running in the way they prefer, causing them to lose Stamina. By having a Pace Chaser in your second slot, they can build off of following your Front Runner. This also means that if for any reason your Front Runner gets surpassed later in the race or begins to run out of steam, the Pace Chaser will be best suited to immediately pick up the slack on the final spurt to clinch out the race.
The final slot on your team is dependent on who you have available and who you have trained, but it is often best suited to be a Late Surger or End Closer. This allows you to cover most spaces in the race, but Late Surgers and End Closers benefit from saving most of their power until the last moments of the race, often giving them the ability to close out with sudden bursts of speed that aren’t fully expected. In some cases, this can also help to give you better coverage across the scope of a race to avoid being boxed in or trapped by other racers. This also helps you prevent your racers accidentally stepping on each other’s toes, as multiple Front Runners will simply drain each other’s stamina, and multiple Pace Chasers may not always be ideal either.
Not So Nice Nature
PVP teams can also contain a different set of builds, trying to compensate for different running styles, strategies, and conditions, but there’s another aspect of PVP racing that Career Mode often has no use for it gets overlooked: Debuff builds. Debuffs are skills that are denoted by Red icons, which essentially do one of two things: they force racers to slow down, or they drain their stamina, essentially draining their health. This is where Late Surgers and End Closers can truly shine, because the lessened requirement for them to have high stamina or power allow you to safely place them in the back to trigger their debuffs, even if they won’t likely win the race themselves. Debuffers are hard to build, however, because they still need a fairly competitive kit in order to keep up with the rest of the pack, while also having exceptionally high Wit compared to other races. Where 300 to 400 Wit will generally get your skills to activate more often than not, Debuffers want very high amounts of Wit because their entire purpose in the race is to sabotage other racers; if their skills don’t go off, they’re a useless slot.
Debuffers come in a few different shapes, but generally some of the best suited racers for Debuff builds are Grass Wonder, Nice Nature, and Symboli Rudolf who make for good possibilities in the current state of the game. You’ll also want skills called All-Seeing Eyes (Late Surgers) and Petrifying Gaze (End Closers). While other positions can also use or obtain debuffs, you’ll generally find better success with racers that are further back in the race, and you’ll also want to prioritize debuffs that target strategies you’re worried about, such as “Hesitant Pace Chasers” or “Hesitant Front Runners”.
If Debuffers sound too hard to build or you feel as though you can’t take advantage of building them, it can also help to just be “aware” that they exist when you try to train for PVP modes; often, you will generally want to ensure that your racers have good Stamina and Speed stats, while also packing at least one Gold healing skill (Such as the ever present Swinging Maestro), and a few skills to help recover speed; it is also important to note that Debuffers tend to be more prevalent in longer races than shorter, so you may want to focus on building your own or countering them for those distances, while not worrying about them as much in Sprint or Mile.
Champion Meets: What They Are
Aside from Team Races, the bigger target for most racers is Champion Meets. Champion Meets happen periodically and are announced in advance, giving players the opportunity to see the Distance, Season, Side of the Track, Condition, and Turf type. There’s no real “mystery” to the Champion Meets: you know the same amount of information that everyone else knows, meaning that you and every other player can begin training racers for the challenge. Champion Meets are slightly different from other goals you might have, because clearly knowing the tracks and how they work mean you can build Umas specifically for these races, even taking skills you may not normally take.
The first race, Taurus Cup, takes place on Tokyo Turf 24000m (Medium) Left Spring Sunny Firm. While that may initially read like meaningless words, this list gives you hints towards the types of racers you will want to train, but also particular skills that you can learn to give you an edge (or skills you should expect other people to possibly bring, and plan your builds around what you can do to measure up to them). For example, Firm Conditions is a Green skill that gives your racer a flat bonus of 40 Power, and the upgraded version gives you a flat 60 Power. This means that you can target a certain amount of Power in your training, and supplement it with Firm Conditions to give you the extra amount you might want to be in your best shape for the race. This follows through to the other qualifiers: You might want to take skills for the location of the Track (Tokyo), the weather (Sunny), the Season (Spring), or even the side of the track (Left).
These skills are often part of either a Racer’s kit or Support Cards, and so it becomes important to read what cards have skills you will want to try and learn and unlock while training your racer; this can lead to some surprising selections in terms of cards, such as possibly considering the Ines Fujin SSR Guts Card (if you have it); while Guts are often considered off-meta in the URA scenario, Ines’s card comes with numerous skills that can be beneficial for this race, such as Moxie, which helps Front Runners stave off fatigue on an uphill, and the Tokyo Race course features a fairly steep uphill midrace.
Champion Meets happen regularly, and you can expect to see them announced a few weeks ahead of when they are slated to occur; even if you don’t plan to try and “win” them, participating at all can give amazing benefits, and getting decent placements in the Champion Meets gives increasingly good benefits. So even if you feel like you aren’t “ready”, you still have time to train for it, and there’s nothing wrong with not doing well; you’ll still benefit from the experience and know how to approach the next meet better, while still getting numerous rewards for your participation. Just from data we have from the Japanese run of the game, winning a Champion’s Meet can net you 3600 Carats, while winning some can even get you 1940 Carats, which is still an amazing bounty just for showing up and training a few Umas ahead of time.
Preparing for the Taurus Cup
Due to the fact that the EN release of Umamusume: Pretty Derby is years behind the Japanese release, we have ample amounts of data for what the Champion Meets look for or require, which can help provide a lot of insight for players approaching the race and wanting to know how to “win”. Although, I will caution that it is okay to NOT win, and it is also okay to just approach the race with whatever you have and whatever you bring. One of the mistakes I’ve seen in early coverage of the game is the insistence on “the meta”, which has led to people falling into traps, such as the hysteria over Kitasan Black’s SSR Support Card (Yes, the card is very good, but no, you didn’t need 5 copies or delete the game).
So, as my first tip for preparation for this or any Champion Meet: only invest as much time as you are interested in investing, and remember that the fun of the game is to participate and see how well your racers can do. If you don’t think you can spend hours fine tuning your team, then don’t! Just race and have fun. There is a difference between being competitive and being obsessive, and at the two month mark I have already started to notice players getting burnt out of the game, and the Champion Meet is a point in which that burnout might hit a high. Pace yourself, and you will find that there are literal years of new challenges, content, and things to do in this game coming up.
Now then, on to the race itself! First, the Taurus Cup is a Medium race at 2400m, which is a somewhat tricky distance to master. Medium races require a very solid balance of stats, particularly Stamina, Speed, and Power, as well as Wit for skill activations. It isn’t quite the inverse of Sprint to Long, where you focus on Speed and Power for Sprint and Stamina and Speed for Long, but it certainly has a requirement that your stats be properly focused in order to ensure your Uma has the correct amount of health to survive the race, speed to win it, and power to push them over the top in a battle against other racers of comparable speed. Medium racers often desire almost maximum speed and very high Stamina, often around 800 or 900 at minimum, as well as healing skills such as Swinging Maestro. This means that building for a Medium race means a deck of Speed and Stamina cards, and generally inheriting Stamina to help give extra boost to the stat since it is harder to train in tandem with Speed/Power; while Speed boosts Power and Power boosts Stamina, Stamina boosts Guts, which is not ideal.
Pick Your Winning Ticket
Once you’ve settled on a racer for this distance, keep in mind that you’ll need two more of them to complete your team, so you’ll likely want to set your sights on three or four Umas that you have available to train, and begin working on them. If you’re limited in terms of your roster because you either haven’t pulled many extra racers, or just don’t feel like it, you can still make a competitive team off the five racers you’re given when you start the game, namely focusing on Gold Ship, Vodka, and Daiwa Scarlet.
All three of these racers have a base A for Medium and Turf, and their running styles are varied enough that you can (without inheritances) run Daiwa as Front Runner, Vodka as Late Surger, and Gold Ship as End Closer. Their base skills are also beneficial, as they all have some form of recovery built into their kits, although these may not be ideal when you have options to pursue things like Swinging Maestro. Gold Ship is an especially strong candidate for the Taurus Cup, and if you have access to a 3 Star version of her, she’s likely to be on your team no matter who else you have; her kit is very good at this distance, and much of the existing data from the original running of the event in Japan features Gold Ship as a top pick in most teams.
If you have a more robust roster, you still don’t necessarily need a lot of “rare” racers; many of the 1 and 2 star Umas are great options, although the more upgraded star level versions of them you have access to, the better; for example, 3 Star Mejiro Ryan is very good in this race, but lower rarity versions are slightly worse performing. The BNW trio of Biwa Hayahide, Winning Ticket, and Narita Taishin can also be strong contenders here, although two of them are 3 stars (Biwa and Taishin). Maruzensky is another fantastic option if you have her, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to select her from the 3 star ticket just for this race (but if you like her, go for it!).
If I had to make a few suggested trainees, I’d likely break them down this way, with one caveat, which is that I would always take Gold Ship AND two of these other options in almost all cases. Now then, the lists:
Starters Only: Gold Ship, Vodka, Daiwa Scarlet
Some Pulls: Winning Ticket, Nice Nature, Agnes Tachyon, Winning Ticket, Matikanefukukitaru
Some 3 Stars: Maruzensky, Oguri Cap, Symboli Rudolf, Anime Teio, Special Week
Other Recent 3 Star Choices: Narita Taishin, (Upcoming) Narita Brian
For the last list, keep in mind that you are able to select 3 Star simply for starting the game as part of the bonus for the launch, meaning that you can get at least one of these (except for Anime Teio) off of that ticket. And, much like I’ve mentioned in other guides, simply having a 3 Star Uma does not mean you will perform better than people without them; as I’ve mentioned, Gold Ship is particularly strong in this race to the point that she is often rated higher than all 3 Stars available in the game right now, and she comes with the game for free!
Skills and Stats to Look For
As mentioned above, Medium races often want as close to max Speed as you can get (so somewhere around 1000 to 1200), good amounts of Power (700~ or s), and high Stamina (800 or higher, preferably higher especially if you don’t have a lot of healing skills). The higher stamina you can get, the better, because this will help you stave off Debuff builds from other opponents by ensuring you have a good amount of HP in the bank and healing skills to help counteract the effects of the Debuffs. After these milestones, Wit is the last thing to consider; you often want to get at least 300, which isn’t that hard in a successful career run, and even 400 is an ideal target if you can manage it or get lucky with summer training. Since you have to train 3 total runners, it is not a bad idea to rotate your daily trainings until you are happy with one of them, and then work on another; there is quite a bit of time before the race, so even doing 3 campaigns a day for a few days should get you to a good state.
Unlike other Career Runs where you are looking to get B+ or A ranks for Sparks, however, these runs are very specifically about getting the skills and stats you want for the Taurus Cup itself. This means that you may want to save Skill Points until you absolutely feel you need them to clear Career mode optimally, and remember that you want skills to use for a race you’ll be doing later, not currently; this can often lead to forgetting the value of skills like Firm Conditions, Left Handed, or other Green skills that players often ignore for more important Gold Heals and Gold Speed skills.
A good way to test the efficacy of your racer ahead of time is to have them race for you in Team Races and see how things go. Keep in mind that Team Races have semi-randomized, so it can be important to remember that you may not always get the same conditions (Location, Length, Weather, Season, etc.) but you can still get a pretty good sense of where your racers stack up against random opponents. If you find that you are doing well and seem to be in the target ranges of what most suggestions make for the Taurus Cup, you can probably move on to fine-tuning other people in your team.
A few important skills to look out for are Green skills, such as: Firm Conditions, Spring Runner, and Left-Handed, which all provide stat boosts to your racers; since the conditions of the Taurus Cup are static, you can always count on getting these stat boosts to your racers. Another Green skill that is impotant to consider is the speed skill Lone Wolf, for two reasons. Lone Wolf provides a flat speed boost to your race, but only on the condition that they are the only racer on the field who has the skill. So if you do take Lone Wolf, only ONE racer in your team can have it. However, what if an opponent has it? Well, then you aren’t the Lone Wolf, are you? Therefore… the skill cancels itself out, and neither racer benefits from it. This means that Lone Wolf is not as much of a gamble as it seems; you either get a boost because none of your opponents have it, or you prevent your opponent from getting a boost.
For Gold skills related to speed, skills like Professor of Curvature, Tail Head High, It’s On!, Slipstream, and Playtime’s Over are great choices. Less specific skills that are still good to consider are style specific (such as Front Runner Corners or Pace Chaser Straightaways) or distance specific (Medium Corners). Remember, you’re building this team to run this specific race, so buying in “limited” skills that don’t seem to have universal utility is fine as long as they are useful in the Taurus Cup.
For healing skills, we find ourselves once again at the mercy of Super Creek: You absolutely want your racer to have Swinging Maestro (unless your racer IS Super Creek, obviously). In many cases, you are probably fine without worrying about other healing skills if you feel you won’t have the skill points for them, but some other good choices are Hydrate/Gourmand for Pace Chasers, Moxie for Front Runners (to deal with uphill fatigue), or Relax (Late Surger). A few Umas have very good built in heal abilities, such as Sleeping Lion (Narita Taishin) and Trackblazer (Mihono Bourbon), and Unique skill choices from 3 star Agnes Tachyon’s U=ma2 and Super Creek’s Pure Heart.
A final consideration if you have the points is the Tokyo Racecourse skill; although perhaps not as mandatory as some of the above skills or even other Green skills, it provides 40 or 60 Stamina (depending on the level you can afford), which might provide you the extra burst of health you need to surpass other racers and help counteract any debuffs.
Be on Team Fun (But Still Try to Win)
Hopefully you’ve found this guide helpful if you were intrigued by PVP in Umamusume, or you’ve begun to hear people discuss the upcoming Challenge Meet after the August schedule was posted to the Umamusume socials. Challenge Meets become an increasingly important aspect of the Umamusume: Pretty Derby experience, so learning the ropes of the Taurus Cup will serve you well for future races. Even if you aren’t able to win, don’t feel discouraged; taking place in the race at all is something you can say you did, and learning how to train for them and seeing how well your racers can do is a reward on its own, and you get numerous chances to try the races and improve what you’re doing if you feel like the first time didn’t work out the way you wanted.
PVP is part of what makes Umamusume: Pretty Derby so unique, and I encourage you to try it out, even if it just means trying to remain high rank in Team Matches or clutching out a win in Champion Meets, taking a win in PVP can provide a rush that tells you you’re on the right track when it comes to training, raising, and understanding Umas and what you need to do. I hope to see you all out there on the track later this month!
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