The Gemini Cup is upon us, with only a few days left until registration opens. Like many trainers, you’ve likely found the preparations grueling and stressful. While the Gemini Cup is an intensely grueling race, there’s still time to try and hone in a few final runs and attempt to craft a team of trainees for the race. If you’ve been following our guides detailing which trainees to work with, how the race works, or any of our previous guides, then this final guide takes a look at the most impactful variable available to you in your training runs: Support Cards. We’ll also talk a few final things to consider and keep in mind for the cup, including the difference between Graded and Open and which is probably the right fit for you, and a few notes about looking forward to the next race and what’s coming next for Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
If you’re a newer player or curious about how the game works, I suggest taking a look at our previous guides: Career, Support cards, Inheritances, PVP, and more. For returning players, if you are just now starting your Gemini Cup preparations or attempts, don’t fear: while the cup officially starts on the 7th, the actual races take a few days to begin after registration begins, meaning you’ve still got about a week to put together a team.
Final Preparation Notes About Gemini Cup Preparation
Before getting into the Support Cards themselves, I wanted to take a little time to talk about the Gemini Cup itself. We’ve covered it in the past few articles, talking about skills, length, and difficulty, but what I wanted to actually address is the fact that I’ve seen a lot of online sentiment about how people are feeling about the race, and the sense of pessimism surrounding it due to how difficult and exacting the preparation of the race has seemed to be. While the discussion of the race being difficult is not inaccurate, but the biggest problem with the conception of the race is that not hitting perfect stats (like 1200 Stamina and 1000 Speed) means that there’s no point in running the race at all, or that even after all of the prep, people feel like they are just not going to be good enough to produce a team worth running.
The first thing I wanted to note is that the Gemini Cup is considered one of the most difficult Challenge Meets in Umamusume, and the accelerated schedule of the Global Server has not made that difficulty any easier; if anything, it has made it a lot harder, because the time crunch between releases and truncated training schedules can make it feel like there’s no good way to make progress. The lack of carats in the Global economy to accommodate that faster pace is also making things more difficult, because many of the guides written or recorded are coming from people who have premium accounts with multiple MLB SSRs and SR cards. Take it from me: I actually have a pretty mediocre overall account to work with, and while I’m struggling to meet “premium” targets, I’m still preparing racers that can, and will, likely do well for a simple reason: there are thousands of players in the Global Umamusume: Pretty Derby servers who don’t really know what they’re doing and aren’t going to devote hours and days to prepping racers.
If you’re looking to compete in the Challenge Meet at all, just do it because you want to have fun and you want to try it out. Winning or losing doesn’t matter, and even for the most competitive players, the rewards are fairly even amongst the various ranks of 1st, 2nd, and Participation at the end; this is even more true in the sense that Graded A and B prize differences really aren’t that huge. I took first in Graded B and received better prizes than my friends who made it to Graded A and only got Participation. There’s no money or anything on the line here, and while the satisfaction of winning does feel good, just keep in mind that this is a game, and you are playing it to have fun. If preparing for the Gemini Cup has not been fun, or if you have been feeling like because you can’t meet the goals of a “perfect” candidate you shouldn’t bother, I urge you to reconsider and try the race anyway.
Support Cards for the Gemini Cup: How They Work
Perhaps one of the most important key aspects of Umamusume: Pretty Derby’s gameplay cycle is the impact that Support Cards can have on your performance. Although we have touched on Support Cards in a separate article, to reiterate how they work, Support Cards represent various statistics, and are representative of various Trainees. Support Cards come in three styles: Rare, Super Rare, and Super Secret Rare, otherwise known as R, SR, and SSR. The biggest note about how Support Cards work is that you cannot use two cards of the same Trainee, and you cannot use cards that represent the trainee you are currently trying to train. Other than that, the only note of importance is that you have 5 cards of your own, and 1 card borrowed from friends or other players.
Support Cards appear during your career trainings with a random chance, and who shows up where can always be generally left up to the random chance of the game itself, although support cards occasionally come with a stat known as Specialty Priority. Specialty Priority is a percentage chance for the trainee to appear on their designated stat, for example, the SSR McQueen card for Stamina has Specialty Priority 50, meaning that there’s a 50% chance that the support card will appear for Stamina training. The biggest struggle players have with the game is running into the problem that even a heavily stacked support deck tipping towards one stat doesn’t always result in them showing up to the training you’re looking for, and not always with the results one might desire. The images of 5 rainbow Speed supports for +100 is far less common than it seems, sadly, and the reality is that such huge gains are statistical outliers rather than common occurrences. This can be manipulated slightly by the cards selected and their levels, as things such as Specialty Priority can increase the higher level the card is.
One aspect of Support Card discussion that isn’t always included is that their LB level and actual levels increase their effectiveness across the board, but can also mean that simply being told to “use” a card but not having it at the right level or uncapped potential means that diminishing results are heavily possible. The guide of cards I’ll be going into here talks about the cards generally, but in the event that a card doesn’t fit or isn’t available, it is usually best to simply replace it with the best available card you have in the same stat (and don’t be afraid to use R cards if that’s all you have!) except for one specific card, which we’ll go into next.
The Rainbow Standard: Super Creek
The Gemini Cup is a Long Distance race, meaning that the most important single card in your deck for this race is going to be SSR Super Creek. The importance of the recovery skill Swinging Maestro cannot be denied, and it makes the card possibly the best card in the Global Release library. While Kitasan Black is often touted as an important and integral Speed training card, Super Creek’s recovery skill is so important that if the choice was running an MLB Kitasan Black or a LB0 Super Creek, you should choose Super Creek. While there’s room to experiment with Support Cards and there are many, many more cards on the horizon, Swinging Maestro’s ability to greatly heal on corners is invaluable to restoring Stamina in almost any race other than Sprints, and especially so for Long Races, but the real problem is that because Swinging Maestro is so ubiquitous, your competitors are at a disadvantage without it.
Super Creek can be a frustrating card, especially since the requirement to use her doesn’t always come with her best possible abilities. She has incredibly low friendship gauge movement at lower levels, and even at lvl 50 only has 35 Specialty Priority, but the worst thing of all is that there is no guaranteed way to actually trigger her event to give you Swinging Maestro. Taking every possible “!” event with her to increase her friendship gauge can help, but there really is no way to ensure the event will happen, and I’ve had numerous runs of my own end with the notion that my trainee would have been amazing, had I only managed to obtain Swinging Maestro as the URA Finale race wraps up.
For the sake of Gemini Cup, however, Super Creek does produce a few good skills other than Swinging Maestro: She can provide hints for Firm Conditions and Homestretch Haste, both great skills that make the card overall useful and relevant. Just remember that you are primarily including this card for Swinging Maestro, but she does provide 30% bonus to Friendship Training, which means she can also provide fairly big gains to your Stamina goals (and other trainings that she appears in, to lesser impact).
Ideal Stamina Cards
Aside from Super Creek, your choices for other Stamina cards is a little more diverse. First and foremost is the SSR Mejiro Mcqueen card, “Your Team Ace”, which is available through redemption for Club Points. This means that as long as you are a fairly active player in a Club, getting a few copies of Mejiro McQueen (or already having her) is likely easy to accomplish. She’s a fairly solid Stamina card, and generally stops giving benefits at LB3 (in that it is probably better to pursue the Rice Shower card instead with your points).
McQueen doesn’t provide the most amazing skills, but she has very good training stats that make her valuable: she provides an initial Stamina boost to your stats and a multiplier on Stamina Training, 30% mood amplification and 28% Friendship Bonus at lvl 45. That means that McQueen and Super Creek combined can do a lot of work for your Stamina training alone, and even more if paired with other cards.
Speaking of Rice Shower’s SSR Card, “Showered in Joy”, that’s another free SSR available with Club points, and one that can provide fairly good return on investment due to friendship bonuses and mood effects. The skills are similarly not fantastic, but for the Gemini Cup your priorities are Swinging Maestro, other gold recovery skills matching your style of racing, and Green Skills that provide flat buffs; ontop of that, having these three Stamina Cards in your deck is probably enough to produce fairly solid trainees (assuming that they show up, of course), and are functionally available to every player, as you can always borrow Super Creek from someone else.
If you have more cards available in your own collection, a solid final option is the SR Zenno Rob Roy [The Perfect Book for You], which gives bonus starting Stamina and Friendship bonuses, but also has a few events that can restore Energy to you during training, meaning you may luck out in getting one more training session in before having to take a dreaded rest. The only two other SRs in Stamina in Global currently are Mayano Top Gun who you can’t use if you’re training either version of her, but if you’re not, Mayano has absolutely no friendship gauge boost, meaning she has to raised completely from 0, and provides fairly mediocre bonuses. Manhattan Cafe is the only other SR, but for the Gemini Cup the only benefit she provides is teaching Stamina Eater to your Debuffer. However, if your choice for Stamina cards are MLB Mayano Top Gun and Manhattan Cafe and none of the other cards here, you’ll want to run them. A Gemini Cup deck very likely wants at least 3 Stamina Cards, if not 4, depending on what cards you have and what MLB/Levels they are at, so don’t overlook even R cards at MLB if you have them to fill gaps.
Power Cards: Hidden Weapons
Power Cards don’t get a lot of discussion in much prep for the Gemini Cup, but that is perhaps one of the larger mistakes in many guides. While running 4 Stamina cards and 2 Speed cards does seem like a “standard”, mixing things up with 3 Stamina, 2 Speed and 1 Power card can provide possibly better and more stable results, especially if certain cards are utilized due to one specific stat: Stamina Bonus. There are only 4 Power cards that provide this currently: SSR Smart Falcon and SR Hishi Amazon, Biwa Hayahide, and Mejiro Ryan. Smart Falcon unlocks hers at level 35, while the SRs all do so at level 45, meaning that you’ll need a few copies of the cards in order to get this bonus, but having it can do some amazing things to your training routine, particularly in helping you round out your Power stat, but also providing passive Stamina Growth when you train with them. While it will never be quite as powerful as a Stamina card itself, Stamina Bonus 1 can make training your Power stat less punishing to your rotation, especially if your trainee has Stamina scaling (Like Gold Ship or Matikanefukukitaru). You will never replace the direct benefit of a Stamina card with Stamina Bonus 1, but it certainly helps.
The biggest difference will generally be which of the cards you run, since you will probably only have the ability to make space in your deck for one of them, at which point you generally should just select the card you have the highest level in and with the Stamina Bonus unlocked. It is worth noting that the R versions of all of these cards have Stamina Bonus as well, if those are the only things you have available; however, if your choice is to run an R Power card or an SR Stamina or Speed card, I’d suggest ignoring the R Power card. Of the SRs, Biwa Hayahide is actually the best option because of another stat she provides: Training Effectiveness. This is a card stat that is often attributed to what are called “Roamers”, which are essentially Support cards that can have big impacts on your trainings even if they don’t appear in their own stat. Biwa has 15% (with her unique trait) at lvl 45, as well as 60% chance to show up in Power and a 30% Mood amp, so she can do a lot of heavy lifting for you in the “off” slot of Power.
Speed Cards: Not Everything is Kitasan Black and White
In the early weeks of Global, much noise was made about the Kitasan Black support card and how having it, or borrowing it, would make or break accounts and trainees. It cannot be understated that the card is good, but there is actually some hysteria surrounding it that makes it seem catastrophic to not have the card available. Since Gemini Cup is a distance race and needs you to focus on recovery skills, Kitasan Black may not be the “best” option in your Speed slot, especially if you only have a low level version of it; again, if the choice if MLB Kitasan Black or LB0 Super Creek, you take Super Creek for Gemini Cup. Of course, if it is the best Speed card you have (and it is likely the best card in that stat), then take Kitasan Black in your deck.
However, there are some other great options. If you were playing since launch and have an LB4 or MLB Special Week speed card, she can provide your trainees with Gourmand, a Gold recovery skill for Pace Chasers, as well as some very beneficial events (and a unique skill, Shake It Out, which can be a last minute recovery boost). Speed cards are actually currently spoiled for riches when it comes to SSRs, and some great options to compliment your deck alongside Kitasan Black are Kawakami Princess, Silence Suzuka (for front runners) and Nishino Flower. In the SR slot, I would generally suggest in order of quality depending on your LBs: Sweep Tosho > Eishin Flash > King Halo > Narita Taishin. There’s a good chance you’re already training a Narita Taishin anyway, but her card isn’t quite as good as the others. Sweep has some of the best events in the game and some great skills, and Eishin Flash has multiple Energy Recovery and Mood Up events that make her valuable as a utility slot card.
While skills still matter, you really just want to focus on cards that give you recovery skills or Straightaway speed skills, like Front Runner Straightaways (or similar style based skill). There are a lot of Speed cards in Global, meaning that you may not need to dip into R cards as much as in other stats depending on what you have available, but again always prioritize making use of the highest level and highest MLB cards that provide you with the bonuses you need the most.
Wit Cards: Learning the Ropes
Wit Cards are sometimes misunderstood because players don’t always understand the value of the stat. For starters, a “Good” trainee is going to have at least 400 Wit, as that is the general threshold for skill activations to be reliable, but Wit training provides small energy recovery, which many Wit cards can boost. This means that you can negate the “loss” of time on resting by taking advantage of Wit training on turns that seem like they may not be worth the risk of failure, but also don’t seem like resting is the best possible option. Wit cards are fairly broad, much like Speed cards, and there are more SR cards in Wit than almost any other category, each specializing in various things. The best overall Wit cards to consider are SSR Fine Motion, SR Daiwa Scarlet, and SR Mejiro Dober. If you’re looking to build a debuffer, you may also want to consider SR Marvelous Sunday or Nice Nature, or even R Symboli Rudolf.
If you’re curious why I suggest SR Mejiro Dober over SSR Mejiro Dober, that’s because SR Dober provides 15% Training Effectiveness, meaning she’s a great passive roamer to your deck for turns where you aren’t training Wit, and beneficial to you when you take your Wit turns. She also comes with Kyoto Racecourse and Sunny Days, two green skills good for the Gemini Cup, but these are less important than her buffing your training bonuses; unlike other cards in which the R < SR < SSR train usually means you get more benefits, SSR Dober doesn’t have Training Effectiveness, so be sure you’re using the right one. This is why Fine Motion, especially after LB1, is so good: She gives a whopping 225% Training Effectiveness at LVL 50, making her one of the best roamers in the game and with generally valuable card events to help your training.
Guts Really Isn’t Useless
Although Guts still gets a bad rap in Global, the cards can actually still be helpful if you have them available or have few options. For starters, the free Haru Urara SSR card rivals Fine Motion’s roaming support with an innate 15% Training Effectiveness, 30% Friendship Training, and 30% Mood Impact. She provides no skills of merit, but every single training event she has restores energy, meaning she’s a stat stick and battery, and shouldn’t be overlooked if you are able to build a more robust and well crafted deck.
Before someone comes to yell at me, I’m not telling you to put Guts training into your rotation or to build a deck that has a Guts Card, Wit, Power, Speed, and Stamina, but instead just realize that while cards may or may not be “ideal”, if you have cards that can help, you may want to consider them. Guts cards have a fair amount of skills that are good, and most of them provide very solid passive buffs to your training, so if you had no other option, or if you wanted to get experimental, you can try them out. Of them, Haru Urara is certainly the best option, and is the easiest card to obtain and get to MLB if you’ve been playing fairly regularly.
The Woman, the Myth, the Legend: Tazuna Hayakawa
Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to the trainee cards, specifically the two that exist in Global currently: Tazuna Hayakawa and Aoi Kiryuin. I often find that with very “moody” trainees, these cards can be godsends. Although they do not provide Rainbow trainings, Trainee cards provide a different set of benefits, namely that they include stats like Failure Protection and Energy Cost reduction, meaning that you can likely get more trainings in and not fear failing quite as often when you have them in your deck and train with them.
Trainee cards also come with an extra set of Recreation events once you reach a specific level of friendship with them. These events replace your usual trainee recreations, and always result in your Mood increasing, as well as energy recovery, passive stat boosts, and even skill hints. As someone who loves training Narita Taishin, I cannot stress enough how valuable Tazuna has been to my trainings, as the Uma is moody as hell; trainees can even help you recover a negative status effect without needing to go to the infirmary. If you build your bond high enough before the first new years, Trainee cards also give special extra stats, and at the end of a campaign will add +6 to all of your stats if you’ve maxed your friendship with them, making them more valuable for the “lack” of rainbow training than they may seem at first.
Wrapping Up the Gemini Cup: Open or Graded, and Beyond
Finally, let’s talk very briefly about which category you should try: If you have been mostly training B+ or A ranked trainees, I urge you to try the Graded league for the Gemini Cup. Yes, I know that you may say your trainees aren’t perfect or ideal, but they will not be able to compete in Open (which caps at B), and you aren’t looking to win the Grade A category anyway if you’re worried about your trainees not hitting the max quality caps. The biggest problem is that Open League is, frankly, a trap: the most min-maxing players are in Open League, who know exactly how to obtain the perfect “B” grade Umamusume that will blow any other competitor out of the water.
Beyond the Gemini Cup, the next race on the horizon is the Cancer Cup, a 1600m Mile race. We’ll be covering this race in more detail shortly as the schedule becomes more well known and the Gemini Cup is a thing of the past, but the biggest foresight tips to give is that Mile races are considerably “easier” to train for than the grueling Stamina and Speed requirements of Gemini Cup, primarily because Speed training raises Power, and so training Speed and Power is far more mutually beneficial than training Stamina and Speed is. That doesn’t mean that it will be “easy”, but if you found the Gemini Cup completely brutal and pushing you to the point of burnout, don’t fear: the next few Challenge Meetings are far, far less grueling than this one, and the wider net of trainees and support cards will increasingly make the races more diverse and interesting. If you like our Umamusume coverage, 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 next time, I hope to see you out there on the track!
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