Although we’re a few weeks out of needing to start preparations for the third Challenge Meet, it may be timely to continue our series of guides discussing Distances and how to raise successful Trainees for them in Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Last time, we took a look at Sprint Distance, the shortest races in the game, and this week we’ll take a step up into one of the more complicated lengths: Miles. Mile distance races in Umamusume require attention to numerous stats in order to raise a successful racer; while Sprints can often get away with extremes of Speed and Power, Miles require a little more work to ensure that your trainee has not only enough speed and acceleration to cover the distance, but also the stamina to survive the race and the intelligence to activate skills.
One of the quirks of Mile distance is that skill activation play a very big role in them. While skills are always important, Mile distance wins often mean the difference between skills activating and not, and since Mile doesn’t put much emphasis on recovery skills, that also means that the majority of skills you’ll want to look for are based on acceleration and velocity. In our guide this week, we’ll talk a bit about the unique differences of Mile from other races, some support deck options to try, and a few trainees to consider for not just the upcoming Challenge meet, but just for Miles in general. If you’re new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we have a growing collection of guides, including our previous one about Sprint distance races, Career Mode, Inspirations, Support Decks, PVP for both the Cancer and Gemini Cups, and many more that you can find here on our site.
Mile Distance and You
As one of the two “middle” distance races, Miles are slightly deceptive in what exactly is required to be successful in them. While Sprints can allow for almost dangerously low levels of Stamina and Guts, Miles require a threshold amount to ensure that the racer’s speed doesn’t start dropping. There’s also a need to ensure that skills activate, which means that Wit requirements start at 400 and trend a little higher. If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is, sort of: Mile races require a bit more in terms of stat management than Sprints of Longs, which tend a little more towards extremes (Speed and Power or Speed and Stamina, for example), where maxing Speed is followed by as close to max Power as possible and then threshold amounts of Stamina, Guts, and Wit.
The two most important stats for Miles are Speed and Power. As we discussed in the Sprint guide, Power affects your trainee’s acceleration, meaning that it is the time it takes them to reach top speed, particularly in the final spurt of the race. If you were one of the people who found your racer being overtaken in the recent Gemini Cup despite thinking you had enough Speed, two things were likely happening: Your racer’s loss came from their draining Stamina, or your opponents simply had more Power, meaning that they overtook your trainee at the last moment. Power in Miles can mean victory or defeat in the final moments, because trainees with higher power will surge forward and accelerate past your racer; barring some last second massive drop in speed or stamina, once you lose the lead it is very unlikely that your trainee will recover it. Speed is the ever important stat of how fast you go at top speed, but Power controls when you reach that top speed, and the lower it is, the slower you reach it; that means that even a slightly lower Speed Uma with higher Power can possibly overtake you in the final moments.
Stamina and Guts play more important roles here than one might expect; while the prevailing dialogue about Guts is that the stat is “not good”, many trainers have found that having low Guts in the Gemini cup may have cost them the race, because Guts acts as a “secondary” Stamina that kicks in as the other runs out. For Mile races, there’s a threshold of how much Stamina you want, which is around 600, and 300~ Guts; the issue comes from the fact that more than these numbers is actually detrimental unless those numbers come from passive bonuses like end of Career bonuses (For example, beating the URA Finale often gives around 30~40 in all stats depending on some variables). So ending up with 600 Stamina is probably fine, but hitting somewhere around 700 or higher means that you may have accidentally trained too much in something that isn’t Power and Speed. The same goes for Guts, perhaps even moreso: Guts trains passively off of Stamina training, and since you may not be doing much Stamina training, ending up with more than 300 Guts may mean that something went very wrong to get there. However, since Guts and Stamina interact somewhere to create your health pool, having a bit more Stamina can sometimes offset the problem.
Essentially, somewhere between 280~300 Guts is the target for Miles, and 600~700 Stamina, where you’ll likely want to at least attempt to ensure you hit that Stamina through a bit of early training and possibly a Summer training or two to really make sure you’ll hit the target. Otherwise, your goals are 1200 Speed, A Lot of Power (900+), 600 Stamina, 300 Guts, and 400+ Wit, ideally hitting above that if you’re trying for “Gamblers”, which are generally Front Runners who try to activate as many skills as possible. These aren’t exactly set in stone except for Speed; the closer to Max Speed you can get, the better your Mile trainee is going to be, but Power is required to ensure they actually hit 1200!
Inheriting for Miles
One of the benefits of Sprint and Mile distance is that they both prioritize Speed, and Speed training also boosts Power. For that reason, inheriting Speed or Power can help your goals, and depending on what you have available to take for Parents, either option can be good: the more Power you inherit, the less you have to train it over Speed, and the more Speed you take, the faster you can hit max and focus on Power. You may also want to tailor your inherits to what stats your Trainee naturally grows; Vodka, for example, gains 10% Speed and 20% Power, meaning that you may want to inherit Speed on her in order to ensure you’re hitting the goal easier than you might on someone like Silence Suzuka, who gains 20% Speed but 0% Power.
After determining which stat to inherit (or both, if you are lucky enough to have 9%* or similar parents in both Speed and Power), the next inherits to look for are Turf and Mile, either to make your trainee compatible with the track or distance, or to try and inherit S rank in those stats for better overall performance. Track aptitude affects Speed, while Distance Aptitude affects Stamina consumption, meaning that S in either or both gives your trainee a considerable boost in how they are managing themselves in the race. For the record, Style Aptitude only impacts Wit, and while S in Style is good, it is the least important of the 3 aptitudes.
Finally, you may want to experiment with inheriting parents who have a mixture of your primary stat and Stamina, just to ensure that you will casually hit your Stamina target without having to actually put any training into it. While 600 may not sound like a “lot” compared to 1200, you’ll find that actually hitting above 400 without spending time in training Stamina (primarily through Summer) is harder than it seems. To inherit Stamina and not lose out on Speed and Power, you may want to look for parents who have 3 Star Stamina alongside 6 Star Speed or Power. Aside from that consideration, looking for Unique Skills to inherit from will generally depend on what style of Runner you are going for; Front Runners will want Seiun Sky’s Angling x Scheming, for example, but non-front Runners have no use for the ability, while Late Surgers or End Closers may benefit from inheriting Mejiro Ryan’s Let’s Pump Some Iron or Narita Taishin’s Nemesis, respectively.
Support Deck Basics
Mile Support Decks don’t differ too much from the types of decks you may be already familiar with from training for things like the Gemini or Cancer cup, which often instructed that you build things like 3 SPD 3 STA or 4 STA 2 SPD, where the most “important” stats tended to have more representation in the deck than not. That holds true for Mile, in which your support deck will want to generally prioritize Speed and Power, likely leaning towards 4 SPD 2 PWR, or 3 SPD 3 PWR depending on what is available to you. Perhaps the most important notes about Support Decks is that many guides are written or created with the mindset that players have access to MLB versions of those cards, and it is important to recognize that if your deck is less robust or built than those, you’re going to see far less of the explosive success those guides suggest. It also means that you may have to run more of a stat than others to compensate, so 3/3 or 3/2/1 (With that off-stat being something like Wit, Guts, Tazuna or even Stamina) are things you can consider.
The biggest change from Mile decks compared to Sprint decks is that you do need to include Power cards in some capacity; while some trainees like Sakura Bakushin O can indeed be very successful with 5 or even 6 SPD decks in extreme RNG fishing for rainbows, Miles have too much varied requirements in other Stats to do that, so you’ll need to shoot for something like 4/2 or 3/3. Again, this can be changed depending on your Trainee and their growth preferences; a trainee who gains 20% more Speed but 0% Power would benefit from a 3/3 Deck, because it will help their Power deficit while their innate Speed growth helps them out. You may even want to look for Speed cards that have Power Bonus 1 in their benefits, such as the ever present Kitasan Black, but also in cards like SSR Kawakami Princess, SSR Tokai Teio, SSR Gold City or SR King Halo; Power Bonus provides a multiplier to Power Training, and that means Speed training with these cards will inherently increase your Power as well, making the mutual training gains quite high.
The same is true of Power Cards, which come with Stamina Bonus 1. As mentioned in Gemini Cup preparations, sometimes Power cards with Stamina Bonus can help if you don’t have a robust deck of Stamina options, but here the Stamina Bonus 1 can help you hit the 600 goal of Stamina far easier. Unfortunately, there are not as many cards with Stamina Bonus 1 as there are Power Bonus 1, and your options are limited to SSR Smart Falcon, SR Hishi Amazon, SR Biwa Hayahide, and SR Mejiro Ryan, all of whom (Save Hishi Amazon) are currently available trainees, meaning that if you are training one of them, you can’t use their card. Also, it is worth mentioning that all players can get access to the SSR Winning Ticket Power Card by playing through the Main Story episode 3, and obtain LB copies from the store for Club Points, giving you access to at least one MLB Power card for free (over time).
More Advanced Support Decks
There are some more creative options available to you in Mile decks than might first seem possible, however. For one, Guts cards finally start to make their appearance as viable options for your Career runs, depending on what you have in your collection. By now, most regular players should have access to the SSR Haru Urara Guts card, which works as a strong roaming Friend support card and supplies a lot of Guts, meaning you can avoid likely needing to worry about training the stat ever. SR Air Groove is a Guts card that provides one of the best skills available to Mile runners, Groundwork, which is generally only available otherwise from SSR Stamina Gold Ship and SSR Power Oguri Cap cards; there is a higher probability that you have SR Air Groove than either (or both) of those SSRs, so including Air Groove in your deck to get Groundwork is not as much of a detriment as it sounds.
For Wit Cards, the general Wit card rule applies: Fine Motion is probably your best overall Wit selection, but it is worth considering what skills your Wit card provides and what you are trying to build; Wit cards generally come with Green skills, like Nakayama Racecourse or Fall Runner, or debuff skills like Hesitant Late Surgers or Murmur. Wit Cards generally all perform similar functions, which is that they help increase Energy retention and recovery, and thus picking one to go into your deck is likely more for what it brings to the table for Energy and how much it helps you hit your Wit goals, with skills being secondary, but still worth looking at. Finally, if you do want a Trainer card option, we still really only have two: Kiryuin and Tazuna, with Tazuna always being the best option. Generally, you can skip Stamina cards in your Mile deck, meaning that you can give praying for Swinging Maestro a rest while training for Miles.
Oh God She’s Going for the Jukebox Again: Sakura Bakushin O
I know you probably didn’t expect to see Sakura Bakushin O here again as we talk about trainee options, but honestly, she’s am amazing choice for Mile races with the caveat that she needs to inherit a Mile spark to go from B to A. Other than that, she’s got most of what you’re looking for in a Mile trainee: 20% Speed Growth, good Styles (Front and Pace), and a fairly solid set of inherent skills that benefit her in Mile racing. Also, Bakushin’s career is simple and easy, with the trainee herself being particularly easy to manage compared to many others; she lacks many of the moodier aspects of trainees like Gold Ship or Narita Taishin, and the “harder” races in her career are all Miles, so making her Mile A means that she’ll have an easier time clearing those races and thus having a smoother overall experience in general.
Something to keep in mind though is that some of Bakushin’s skills are specifically for Sprint (such as Turbo Sprint or Sprinting Gear), meaning that you’ll need to make sure you don’t purchase those skills if you are training her to run Miles. This is also why waiting until the end of a Career to purchase skills is a very important step; while it may seem that picking those skills up will help you clear Career mode, a good trainee should be clearing career goals anyway, and as a Pace Chaser or Front Runner, Baksuhin should never have to worry about being blocked or having bad positioning getting in her way during a career.
Mucha Lucha: El Condor Pasa
Another great and fairly common option for Mile racers is El Condor Pasa, who comes with Mile A and prefers running either Pace and Late Surger styles. She also has 20% Speed Growth like Sakura Bakushin O, meaning that in both cases you’ll want to inherit Power to help them out, but both can be incredibly solid choices for your Mile races. El Condor Pasa does have a much more varied racing Career than Baksuhin, so you’ll need to keep that in mind while working on raising her for Miles. Generally this shouldn’t be a concern, but just keep in mind that Medium and Long races place higher importance on Stamina, so if she isn’t hitting the 600 Stamina cap during your training, she may struggle to clear Career goals in those styles of races.
Otherwise, she’s a great F2P option, as she’s a 2 Star trainee when she first arrives and is likely someone you’ve already managed to collect. Her Unique skill at 3 Stars is very strong, and she makes for an excellent Mile contender in a lot of races, provided you ensure she’s got the requisite Power to round out her kit. And, while most Mile races and events take place on Turf, El Condo Pasa has one other notable benefit: She has Dirt B, meaning that getting her to Dirt A for Dirt Mile races is not that difficult if one of her parents is someone like Haru Urara or Smart Falcon, meaning that you can very easily make a good all terrain Mile racer without having to rely on a 3 star trainee like Oguri Cap, if you don’t have her; in fact, Oguri Cap and El Condor Pasa have almost identical Track, Distance, and Style Aptitudes, although Oguri Cap has 10% Power Growth, meaning she can be a stronger Mile trainee than El Condor Pasa, with the caveat that she is a 3 Star trainee who, if you did not obtain from the free selector or from pulls, you may just not have until she comes home. And, El Condor Pasa has a better stat spread, with everything being in the very high 80s or 90s at 3 Star, while Oguri has 66(!) starting Stamina, meaning you’ll need to invest more into her Stamina to hit 600.
Final Considerations
Mile races can be finicky to train for, but they’re great tests of your ability to master Umamusume: Pretty Derby on a level that doesn’t play to extremes. While I personally favor Sprints (mostly due to the trainees), Miles can be a lot of fun and have much more variety to them than one might expect. There are numerous strong strategies to apply in your approach to trainees, whether it be building strong Front Runners like Maruzensky or Seiun Sky, or Late Surgers and End Closers like King Halo or Narita Taishin. Another fun aspect of Mile races is that there are a lot of viable trainees in this category, and even those who require inheritances to be viable are often fairly easy to push to A, as noted by the fact that Seiun Sky is one of the most influential front runners in the game yet starts at Mile C. Don’t let initial Distance aptitude scare you off! You simply need 1 Distance aptitude per letter you want to reach.
Our next Distance guides will focus on Medium and Long, although many players have likely had crash courses in Long races thanks to the Gemini cup; that said, there are still a lot of details, tips, and tricks for these distances that are good to keep in mind and also worth noting for future events and training goals, especially as the game continues to evolve and new events are on the horizon. If you have any questions, leave us a comment down below, shoot me an email at marcy@goonhammer.com, or hit me up in the official GH Umamusume Discord channel! Until next time, I’ll see you out on the track!
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