The first Challenge Meet has come and gone in the Global Umamusume: Pretty Derby release and left nothing but carnage in its wake. Despite guides such as ours, players seemed blindsided by just how difficult and challenging the competition was, as well as what was truly required to take wins home in the world of Umamusume PVP. As the last round was finishing up, Cygames released notice that the second Challenge Meet, the Gemini Cup, is on the horizon in September, meaning that the time to start preparing for this race was likely yesterday. But today works too!
The Gemini Cup, much like the Taurus Cup, is a PVP oriented race in which 9 total Umamusume will compete in teams of 3 to crown a winner. There will be an Open League, with a maximum rating of B, and a Graded League, where most competition starts at A rank, similar to Taurus Cup. But regardless of which League you plan to compete in, Gemini Cup poses some serious challenges to players who don’t consider what they need to train and how. In our guide, we’ll discuss what the Gemini Cup race is, what you need to know about it, suggest Umamusume you can run or expect to see in the race, and discuss Support cards and other strategies. If you’re new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, I suggest looking at our guides on Career Mode, Support Decks, Inheritance Sparks, Potential Levels, our PVP guide, or even our guide on Sprints, as Gemini Cup is going to seriously challenge your understandings of game fundamentals in one of the most brutal races in the game.
Open League or Graded League: Choose Your Destiny
League selection in the Taurus Cup caught many players by surprise, as they either did not know that the leagues existed, or simply assumed they could change at any time; in reality, players are given a few days before the race begins to select their league and change it, but once the first round begins, you are stuck in the one you selected (or, if you didn’t, Open League). The biggest differences between the two Leagues is that Open League caps participation at B rank or lower, while Graded League has no Rank Cap; however, it would be more correct to say that Graded League starts at A and tilts higher, towards A+ or even S.
While the races are often competitive regardless, Graded League is the one with the highest possible rewards, and thus the one most likely to attract highly competitive players who have mastered training loops, or players with high level Support Decks that can achieve higher Ranks easier and take advantage of what they have. However, there’s nothing stopping anyone from attempting Graded League and finding moderate success, and even players with the best decks and highest level Umas aren’t guaranteed to win against smart, prepared trainers.
The goal of training is generally the same as well, except that players must be mindful that Open League Umas cannot exceed B rank, which includes B+; it could even be possible to argue that creating a highly competitive Open League team is about as hard as a Graded League team, because doing “too well” in a Career can result in a trainee that scores too high and becomes unable to enter into the races. Rewards for wins are also mostly the same, with the obvious caveat that winning big in Graded League gives more rewards than Open League, but doing moderately well in Open League versus crashing out in Graded League will be more rewarding to the average player. Select your League based on your playstyle and how much time you want to invest into training, and remember that the goal of Challenge Meets is to have fun; if you are only interested in getting first place and being the best, you run the risk of burning out on the game as Challenge Meet training is often repetitive and slightly boring.
Gemini Cup: A Long Road
One of the first differences trainers may note is that unlike Taurus Cup, Gemini Cup is a Long Distance race, one of the longest in the game at 3200m. Taking place at Kyoto Race Course on Turf, the Gemini Cup positions races on the Right Hand side of the track on Outer Posts, and is run during Spring in Sunny weather on Firm ground. Veteran trainees may recognize that those bolded words are hints, but for newer or first time competitors, the first key important note of Challenge Meets is that the entire track is set in stone before it happens, meaning trainers can, and should, target very specific skills that racers will want to have. While these skills, known as Green Skills, are often not considered especially valuable in regular Career runs, they can be the difference between victory or defeat in the world of Challenge Meets. Seeking out Support Cards or Inheritance Sparks for these skills will help set many trainees off on the right foot, as many of them act as flat stat boosts that can give you the edge. Specifically, you’ll want to look for the skills Right-Handed, Outer Post Proficiency, Kyoto Racecourse, Standard Distance, Sunny Days, and Firm Conditions. While having all of them on a single trainee would be amazing, sometimes it comes down to which you have available and can easily ensure your trainee has, and especially remembering not to focus on these over recovery skills. Also, unless you end up having absolutely nothing else to spend Skill Points on, you only need to take the first level of these skills; the second skill level is generally too small of a boost in stats to matter instead of taking a different skill.
Perhaps the most important thing to note about Gemini Cup is the Long Distance length of the race; unlike other races and general notes on training, Long Distance races require exceptionally high Stamina, and Stamina is the primary stat that you should be focusing on training when preparing for this race. This is mostly inverse of almost all other race lengths, where Speed remains the dominant stat; you still want a lot of Speed in a Long Distance race, but without 1050+ Stamina and multiple Recovery Skills, you’ll watch as your trainee seems to move in slow motion towards the final turn of the race. A standard goal for this race is at least 1050 Stamina and if possible as close to 1200 as you can get, with 1200 Speed or as close as you can get to that being your secondary focus (With a minimum of 1000 Speed likely required for . If required to choose, always pick Stamina over Speed; Gemini Cup is an endurance race. For other stats, Power doesn’t matter quite as much as others, but ideally your racer should hit somewhere around 600 power, likely just passively through Speed Training. Wit is once again very important to competitive racing, with a minimum of 300 being the absolute lowest Wit you can go and hope to get skill activations off of; something closer to 400 would be far more reliable. Finally, or perhaps shockingly, the oft forgotten Guts stat finally rears its head as being moderately valuable; without getting into the complex math of Umamusume, Guts is essentially a secondary Stamina that can act as supplemental Stamina, and you’ll want your racer to have at least 400+ Guts, but not really any more than 500; this is generally fairly easy to achieve passively, as Stamina trains Guts as its secondary stat, but it is at least important to note that there is a Guts threshold this time around too.
Winning From the Back
Gemini Cup is a race that primarily favors End Closer racers, which is mostly due to the original run of the race in the Japanese version of the game and most consistent winners in the data from the race. From that, two specific racers emerged as the most powerful and consistent racers: Narita Taishin and Gold Ship. The good news is that every player has access to Gold Ship, while Narita Taishin is only available to players who managed to pull her from the rotating SSR trainee banners. The two trainees are possibly equally good options for your Ace runner, coming down mostly to which of them you have available to train. However, it is important to note that both Narita Taishin and Gold Ship’s high placement in the Gemini Cup meta relies on both of them being Potential Level 5. Both racers want the skills they get at Potential Level 5, and in Narita Taishin’s case, Encroaching Shadow is the skill that makes her so dominant in the race over everyone else; without it, she’s likely not as good as Gold Ship is. If you can get Narita Taishin to Potential 5, she is absolutely a great candidate for your Ace on your team and worth trying to raise.
If, however, you can’t, or don’t have her, Potential Level 5 Gold Ship is equally as good. While she doesn’t gain a speed skill like Encroaching Shadow, she does get a unique Gold Recovery Skill, Go-Home Specialist, giving her a reliable way to restore her Stamina during the race that is unique to her kit specifically. Gold Ship also benefits from being massively easier to train than Narita Taishin, as she has an innate 20% boost to Stamina training that makes hitting the 1200 cap on Stamina far, far easier than other trainees. It is still important to note that Gold Ship needs to be Potential Level 5 and also Star Level 3 for Gemini Cup, meaning that you’ll need to have collected enough Star Pieces and the requisite banners and other items to get her levelled up to the proper stat-line in order to be competitive. Whichever of these two you choose to train, or both, will provide you with a great leg up on your training as they both come with Long A and End A, meaning they’re already comfortable in their Distance and Style, and that means getting their ranks to S through Inheritances is far easier.
Another good choice, despite not seeming it at first, is Mayano Top Gun; although her preferences are Front or Pace, she is a B in End, meaning that smart and skillful Inheritances in End Closer can get her to S, where her skills (particularly her recovery skills) and 20% Stamina growth can make her shine in a spot she may not have normally seemed like she could have. Late Surgers can also make great choices for this race, whereas Front Runners and Pace Chasers will likely struggle with the race due to the increased Stamina Cost their positions require, except for one: Daiwa Scarlet. Daiwa Scarlet is another free trainee given to all players, and although she is a Pace Chaser and B in Long, with the right inheritances she can become a strong contender in Gemini Cup, with numerous good performances under her belt from the original run of the event in Japan due to her Potential 5 Recovery Skill Race Planner. This is mostly due to her strong stats, good skills, and built in recovery skills. Again, these recommendations come at the expectation that you are running a 3 Star, Potential 5 racer, so please remember those considerations when picking who you want to race.
Racing With Your Life on the Line: Haru Urara
One of the memes of the Taurus Cup was “Nasty Nature”, a Debuff oriented build of the trainee Nice Nature that prioritized stacking her with numerous debuff skills in order to drain the stamina from other racers and help your other two racers push on towards victory. Gemini Cup doesn’t have the same sort of precedence, as the Stamina requirements are already grueling enough and training someone to Debuff specifically a field of End Closers is quite difficult (if not nearly pointless), but there is one particular racer that makes a surprising amount of appearances in Gemini Cup data: Haru Urara. And before you expect this to mean that the secret to victory is to train an extremely kitted out Haru Urara, the opposite is actually true: You run Haru Urara for her to underperform, in order to counter Narita Taishin.
Narita Taishin unlocks a recovery skill at Potential Level 3 known as Sleeping Lion, which triggers based on the distance between the racers at the front and back of the race. Normally, this serves to help make Narita Taishin’s job easier as she is always going to be in the back, but running Haru Urara and having her sink to the back of the pack by extreme distances messes with the ability of Sleeping Lion to work, essentially turning the skill off and making it useless. Not running a Haru as a ringer means that Narita Taishin will have an easier time winning, but it also means that your team will have essentially only two actual racers; however, the dual ace strategy is fairly effective in Gemini Cup, and players who saw success with Nice Nature as a Debuffer should already be familiar with the idea of only having 2 racers who are trying to “win” the race with the third’s job is to make others lose.
You can also run some debuff skills as well, particularly Stamina Eater that Manhattan Cafe’s Support Card can teach being a particularly relevant one for Gemini Cup, and potentially the only real debuff skill you’ll need or want to learn; the need for Stamina and Recovery skills means that anything that could potentially drain that Stamina from other racers may simply be the only thing needed to make them lose, as well as being a reason to remember that trying to hit maximum stamina and carrying recovery skills is the key to success in this race.
Support Deck Suggestions
Long Distance races require Stamina, as we’ve discussed, and that means that your Support Decks are going to want to also favor Stamina heavily; most Support Deck suggestions for Gemini Cup are going to come down to either 3 or 4 Stamina Cards, and then Speed Cards to supplement the rest, with potentially 1 Wit Card depending on what you have available. For example, the already ubiquitous Super Creek is an absolute must here, taking priority even over MLB Kitasan Black if you had to choose between a friend with Kitasan or Super Creek; without Swinging Maestro, you may as well not bother. The skill is, and remains, that good. The good news is that two very good Stamina SSR cards are available to players for free, and levelling them requires Club Points, if you’ve managed to earn them: the SSR Mejiro McQueen and SSR Rice Shower cards respectively, both of which are Stamina cards. To unlock them, players simply need to play through the main story chapters 1 and 2, which reward you with a single copy of the card for doing so, with multiple copies then available for purchase in the store after earning them. Even if they aren’t MLB, a few LBs into the McQueen card (or both!) will provide some amazing boosts to your Stamina training without having to worry about what cards you’ve collected from the banners. Aside from those two, you’ll want to generally select your best overall Stamina cards you round out your deck, again prioritizing Super Creek as a must have in the deck. What level Stamina cards you have will determine if you need to run 3 or 4, but I suggest experimenting with your deck to see what you prefer running. Since the race will need you to have 300 or 400 Wit, running one Wit card along with two Speed Cards will likely provide you with a more well rounded deck, but you may find that your runs don’t always ‘hit big’ on friendship trainings in Stamina when you reduce the amount of cards you’re running.
It’s also important to try and pick cards that have beneficial skills, which is why Mejiro McQueen and Rice Shower can be helpful AND free; still, whatever cards you have are always going to be better than none, and it is worth noting that R versions of cards carry generally the same skills, especially when Green skills are involved, meaning that you can always make substitutions when necessary in a pinch. As far as Speed Cards go, while Kitasan Black is always all the rage, if you don’t have her and have to select a Friend Super Creek, simply pick your two best Speed cards, or try a 3/3 deck of 3 Stamina 3 Speed to help hit your goals. Recovery skills are always worth considering after Swinging Maestro, as long as they fit your racing style (and are not skills like Iron Will), such as Uma Stan, and even Straightaway Recovery can be a valuable pick up for this race that may not see a lot of recommendation or use in other places.
Selecting Your Trainees
As stated above, Narita Taishin and Gold ship are considered the absolute winners in the Gemini Cup, but there are plenty of good options that you can select from depending on what trainees you have available, and also the most important rule: training who you like to train. Some racers simply need considerations like inheritances to make them truly work here, and as long as their starting stat in End Closer or Long is B, upping that to A (and ideally S) is not impossible. Here are some suggestions based on availability:
Starters Only: Gold Ship, Daiwa Scarlet, Haru Urara (for debuff)
Some Pulls: Winning Ticket, Grass Wonder, Agnes Tachyon, Matikanefukukitaru, Super Creek
Some 3 Stars: Mejiro McQueen, Symboli Rudolf, Biwa Hayahide, Narita Taishin, Special Week, Tokai Teio (Anime), Mejiro McQueen (Anime)
Upcoming/Recent 3 Star Choices: Narita Brian, Seiun Sky, Smart Falcon (as a parent), Wedding Mayano Top Gun
Seiun Sky is a racer often talked about with the Gemini Cup for possibilities as either a parent or trainee, but an issue to keep in mind with her is that she’s still not released, and thus getting her and training her in time (in either capacity) can be tricky!
Parents, Sparks, and Skills for Success
A very helpful step in preparing for Champion Meets like the Gemini Cup is to start assembling Parents that can help pass on useful sparks for skills and stats, meaning that early preparation for the race is going to focus more on producing parents with good inheritances than it is immediately hitting the track to churn out the best possible Gold Ship or Narita Taishin. Stamina Sparks are going to be valuable here as we want to get as close to 1200 as possible, and Speed Sparks make for a good choice if you’re planning to go for a 9 Star Stamina and 9 Star Speed parent. If you don’t have that option or don’t have friends you can borrow good parents from, your best bet is to actually opt for Speed Sparks, as you’ll need to focus most of your attention on training Stamina, and then trying to raise Speed as a secondary stat through inheritance events and then as secondary training.
However, parents are more than just the stats they pass on: they also pass on skill sparks, and this can make a lot of your training easier by ensuring that they have skills you want the eventual trainee to have. Getting a parent to pass on their Unique skill, such as Mejiro Ryan’s Let’s Pump Some Iron, can lend some extra power to your trainee, but you’ll also want to try and create parents that can pass on White Sparks such as Kyoto Racecourse, Right-Handed, Sunny Days, Firm Conditions, and similar skills. This makes relying on Support Card hints less important, and also increases the amount of hints your trainee can get for a skill, meaning that the skills will end up costing less in the long run if you manage to procure multiple hints before you purchase the skill.
If you’ve been wondering when you should buy skills when training for Champions Meets, the answer is: At the end of your Career. Although it may seem like you “need” skills to clear the URA Finale campaign, generally if you are properly training your racer in the race length that you’re trying to clear, you shouldn’t need skills to clear the career. It is worth noting what types of races your trainee runs, however, and ensure that you are getting primarily Long races, especially trying to trigger a Long URA finale. To accompany that, the other type of Sparks you’ll want to look for from your parents are Distance and Style specific Sparks, with Turf being last. If possible, try to get a parent duo that can pass on Style Sparks and Distance to get those both to S, as the boost from S rank can be game changing. For the record, Style rating affects wit, while Distance rating affects speed, meaning that S in Distance will give you a Speed bonus, while S in Style will give you a Wit bonus; if you absolutely have to choose, the race Length S rank is more important.
Get Out There and Compete!
PVP Provides some of the most fun and challenge in Umamusume, and not participating in it only provides negatives; the Champion Meets are great ways to earn free resources and give your goals to train for, and make up a great portion of the extra content aside from main campaigns in the game. While some players dismissed the Taurus Cup and seemed to feel as though they weren’t good enough to compete, the goal isn’t to be the best (unless you want it to be), and instead you should shoot to simply try something new and see how well you do. Yes, it feels good to win, and it feels amazing to win really well and show off how great you’ve done, but it’s important to remember that at the end of the day Umamusume: Pretty Derby is a management game that’s meant to be fun, so don’t let training for Champions Meetings stress you out.
Champions Meets are also great ways to start learning the game better, through the process of training specific racers for specific challenges. While having “good” ratings will often let you clear dailies or some team races, it can also become boring if you don’t try to vary up what you’re doing and constantly improve, so Champions Meets can be great yardsticks for that. They can also be helpful in learning Career rotations and training schedules, as the amount of careers you’ll need to run and refine will slowly help you recognize what you should be doing and when to obtain optimal results. Yes, RNG will always be a factor, and sometimes the difference between a legendary Career run and a failure is simply who showed up to training one day, but that’s just part of the game.
You’ve got about three weeks to prepare for the Gemini Cup, so I hope you’ll give it a go and see what you can do in it! 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 Kyoto turf in September!
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