We’ve got a few weeks still before the Cancer Cup kicks off fully in Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which means that there is still quite a bit of time to perfect runs of Parents and Trainees for the cup itself. One of the benefits of Mile distance that that there are numerous viable trainees, so this week we’ll take a look at Support Cards instead of Trainees for right now; as the cup draws closer and you become more familiar with training for Miles, knowing what skills you’ll need, and how to ensure you can get the best set-up of skill events means that there’s a higher chance that whoever you end up training for your set of three competitors, you’ll be able to get them built the best way possible by mastering what support cards will deliver the best results. And, since Support Card availability is reliant on what you’ve managed to pull and collect while playing the game, we’ll offer some options that range from extremely well developed libraries and more generalized ones.
If you’re new to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, I suggest you check out our previous guides, as training for PVP events requires a relatively solid basis of knowledge and experience with the game, such as how to approach Career Mode, what Support Cards are, how Inheritances Work, and what PVP even is in the game. Last week, we put out a beginning guide to the Cancer Cup itself, as well as a generalized guide about Mile trainees, which can both help you get off on the right foot when it comes to this upcoming PVP Champions Meeting.
Support Decks for Miles: All Gas
Unlike the previous Champions Meetings, Stamina plays a far smaller role in this race; Mile races place far higher emphasis on Speed and Power, and while there is a Stamina/Guts threshold that the race generally requires for “Best” performances, Support Decks are going to want to focus on Speed and Power as their primary make-up. Generally, the dominant Stat will boil down to three criteria: Availability, Necessity, and Skills afforded. Your deck will always be strongest with the “Best” cards you have, even if that means using an MLB SR or even R card over a LB0 SSR card. Support cards scale with their LBs and levels, and the lower their levels, the worse they are; also, better rarity cards often have higher benefits like Friendship Training or Specialty Training bonuses, meaning they’re more likely to show up on the right stat during training and provide you the most chances of interacting. Necessity is usually determined by how your Trainee grows during training; if they gain 20% more Speed than Power, you will likely need more Power cards in your deck; if they don’t receive any bonus to Speed or Power, you may need to run a 50/50 deck. Finally, you’ll want to select cards that provide potential skills that are beneficial to Mile races and the Cancer Cup itself.
There is a lot of trial and error when it comes to the perfect Support Deck, and it also depends on what you’re actually raising the trainee for; if you’re looking to raise a useful parent, such as Seiun Sky, then you’ll be looking for Support Cards that can pass on abilities that you’ll want to make easier for your main trainee to have (such as Groundwork), but also making sure that Seiun Sky can easily clear her campaign. If you’re training an actual trainee for the race, then you want your deck to be skewed towards providing you the best possible results, rather than focusing entirely on doing well in Career Mode (where, obviously, you want success, but your major focus will be on maximizing your stats over “winning” every minor goal). If you’re looking to train a Parent, most Parent decks can be far more varied, even running Guts and even Stamina cards to ensure the trainee makes it through the career, and then hopefully sparks skills you want that they can pass on (thus reducing your need to rely on cards you may not want in your deck).
A Trainee for the Cancer Cup deck will, simply, want 4 Speed, 2 Power, and then editing the deck based on what you need. If you feel your Trainee will grow Speed easier than Power, replace at least 1 card with another Power Card, and then see if after a run if you need that to be 4; if your Trainee is extremely moody and difficult to train, consider replacing 1 Speed Card with a Friend card like Tazuna or Kiryuin. And, finally, if your Trainee seems to have difficulty meeting certain stat goals, consider replacing a Speed card with a card that can shore up that stat, such as a Wit, Stamina, or even Guts card; just focus on trying to find “off” stat cards that have high Friendship Training Percentages, such as Guts SSR Haru Urara; that means that when she shows up on stats to train, she’ll provide very high bonuses even though you aren’t training her dominant stat.
If you’re looking to train a Parent, you can likely get away with a 2 Speed, 2 Power, X/X Deck, where the final two cards are selected for either stability in training or skills you are hoping the parent will be able to pass on. For example, Narita Taishin is a notoriously moody trainee, but if you’re looking to pass on Straightaway Spurt, using a card like Tazuna and another in Stamina to help stabilize her Career run to try and pass on effective sparks can be a great option. This is true of almost any trainee who can occasionally struggle with bumpy campaigns; Oguri Cap is another great option due to the sheer number of races she has to run, meaning cards that replace your Energy and help her stabilize her stats can make running her career multiple times for Sparks valuable.
Cancer Cup: The Basics and Green Skills
As a reminder, the Cancer Cup is a 1600m (Mile) Distance race run on Tokyo Turf from the Left during Summer in Sunny Weather and Good Conditions. This means you’ll want to keep an eye out for cards that provide Green Skills such as Standard Distance (which looks for multiples of 400), Summer Runner, Tokyo Racecourse, Sunny Days, and Left-Handed. The new Green skill for Cancer Cup that may also initially confuse trainers is Wet Conditions, which is the opposite of Gemini and Taurus staple skill Firm Conditions: Wet Conditions “improves performance on good, soft, and heavy ground”, so don’t be confused by the words “Sunny” and “Good” in the race description; essentially any race that isn’t listed as Firm is covered by Wet Conditions.
Standard Distance is one of the more “available” skills, and has numerous SSR, SR and R options, namely SSR El Condor Pasa, SSR Bamboo Memory, SSR Nishino Flower, SSR Kawakami Princess, and SR Eishin Flash. A benefit to the card being spread out is that there are numerous cards to select from, and while El Condor Pasa is a popular trainee for the event herself, she could still gain it from inheritances or from selecting a card from the list that isn’t herself. Also, two of them are Power (El and Bamboo) while the other three are Speed (Nishino, Kawakami, and Eishin), so not only is it easier to cover various deck needs, there’s also a lot of flexibility to gaining this skill from cards.
Tokyo Racecourse is a little more difficult; the only current Support Card that has the skill is Vodka’s SSR and R card, limiting the skill’s availability through cards alone. Left-Handed is similar, only being native to SSR and R Silence Suzuka, who is a Speed card but is far more limited in accessibility than other cards. The final “one of” skill is Summer Runner, which is found on Wit Fuji Kiseki SR and R; this skill is even harder to obtain than the others as your only choices are SR and R cards, very likely not the best options for your deck, and unless you are planning to raise a Parent, Kiseki is unlikely to be a super helpful addition to your trainee deck for the races itself, although she does also come with Mile Corners and Unyielding Spirit, both good for Miles on Pace Chasers or further back.
In comparison, Sunny Days and Wet Conditions are far more available across the available cards currently in the Global server. Sunny Days can be found on SSR El Condor Pasa, Satono Diamond, Hishi Akebono, and Mejiro Dober, as well as SR Mejiro Dober and R El Condor Pasa, Dober, Satono, and Akebono. Wet Conditions meanwhile is on SSR Special Week Guts and Speed, Smart Falcon, Mejiro Palmer, and Mejiro McQueen, as well as SR Biwa Hayahide, Manhattan Cafe, Mejiro Ryan, Agnes Digital and Shinko Windy, along with the R versions of Biwa, Manhattan, Ryan, Falcon, Shinko, Digital, and Palmer. Although your parent or trainee won’t require every single one of these Green skills, you may want to try and learn/inherit as many of them as possible, making it far easier to obtain them on your final trainees, especially those that want to use Groundwork.
Laying the Groundwork: Front Runners
Although some of the other races have focused on ensuring certain Stamina skills like Swinging Maestro were passed on, the most “required” skill in the Cancer Cup is the skill Groundwork, specifically on trainees that run Front Runner style. Groundwork functions by having you racer trigger at least 3 skills early race, and passive Green skills count as activated skills, meaning that most competitive front runners will be looking to obtain 3 Green skills and Groundwork as core parts of their kit.
The problem is that Groundwork is not a very universal skill and is not easy to obtain from Support Cards. Groundwork is available from the following cards: SSR Stamina and Speed Gold Ship and Power Oguri Cap, SR Air Groove, and R Oguri Cap, Gold Ship, Symboli Rudolf and Air Groove. This is an exceptionally limited pool, and one of them, SSR Gold Ship Speed, may be one of the worst cards available in the game currently due to the bloated skill pool it contains. That means that most players with limited libraries are likely going to only have access to Groundwork from SR Air Groove or the R versions of these cards, and of those, R Rudolf is fairly unhelpful as her other skills are all debuffs.
The good news is that if you are really looking to train a strong Front Runner for this race, you are likely either training or borrowing a Seiun Sky to pass on Angling and Scheming, and it is very likely that many Seiun Sky’s you’ll find for borrowing will also have Groundwork sparks. This can reduce the burden of trying to pass the skill on if your card selection is limited, or without needing to take cards you wouldn’t want otherwise; if you’re raising a parent in hopes of grabbing Groundwork sparks on them, however, Air Groove Guts is a fairly solid card for parent runs, and Oguri Cap’s Power card is quite useful, so that can also work in your favor depending on who you’re trying to train.
Pace Chaser Deck Suggestions
If you aren’t looking to compete in the Front Runner position in the race, Pace Chasers make up the main bulk of other “meta” competitors. Pace Chasers have an easier time in terms of what skills they can pursue because Groundwork is not required; Green Skills are always universally useful because of the fact that they give flat stat boosts, but the lack of needing Groundwork opens up the fact that your trainee won’t need to inherit the skill from a parent or pursue it off of cards that may not be very helpful otherwise, so deck building becomes slightly more freeing in that regard.
One of the quirks of Miles is that they also don’t require recovery skills, because it is more important to hit the Stamina threshold of 600 than it is to carry recovery skills; while you might think carrying one is useful just in case (such as Gourmand, unique to Pace Chasers), the issue is that these are skills that cost about 300~ skill points total, and you’ll need those skill points for other, more valuable skills that will help your racer compete in terms of speed and acceleration.
The Cancer Cup features a straightaway as the last spurt of the race, so looking for skills like Mile Straightaways is a very solid strategy to help shore up a Pace Chaser; you can find the skill on SSR Vodka and Bamboo Memory, as well as SR Agnes Digital and R Taiki Shuttle; as you may recall, Vodka, Bamboo Memory, and Agnes Digital all have valuable Green Skills, which means these cards can help you cover a few spaces. If you want to help your Pace Chaser move up on the final corner, you could also pursue Mile Corners, which is held by SR Fuji Kiseki and SR Daitaku Helios, as well as R Maruzensky. Style specific skills, like Pace Chaser Corners or Straightaways, are also solid choices, and stack with the others–there’s really never enough of a good thing when it comes to speed and acceleration skills–and you can find Pace Chaser Straightaways on SSR El Condor Pasa and SSR Tokai Teio, as well as R TM Opera O. Pace Chaser Corners meanwhile is slightly more restricted, only being available on SSR, SR, and R Nishino Flower, and SR and R Meisho Doto currently. Of the two, Straightaways is more valuable for Cancer Cup, but again, if you can snag both somehow, it isn’t a bad idea to try.
Late Surger and End Closer Options
Aside from similar positional based skills like Pace Chaser Corners or Front Runner Straightaways, Late Surgers and End Closers do have a few unique skills they may want to consider looking for from Support Cards. There are a few specific abilities that help racers positioned towards the back make late race surgers, such as Updrafters. Available from SSR Vodka, Grass Wonder, Nishino Flower and Biko Pegasus, Updrafters helps Late Surgers and End Closers with their passing ability, which can be valuable in a race where most of the pack is going to be in a big clump towards the front of the pack; there’s also a Gold version of the skill, Furious Feat, which is absolutely worth grabbing if you can, but it’s worth noting that Furious Feat is only available on Grass Wonder and Oguri Cap’s SSRs. Acceleration is another solid choice which increases acceleration when passing a runner mid-race, which both Late and End runners are going to do naturally; this skill is on only a few cards, specifically SSR Gold City, Oguri Cap and Bamboo Memory, making it a little less common than some other options. Like Updrafters, there is a Gold version of Acceleration, but it is only available inherently on Maruzensky herself sadly.
Straightaway Spurt is a skill you may recall from the Gemini Cup, and it returns here if you plan to train an End Closer; Narita Taishin has this skill innately and available in the more powerful Encroaching Shadow, but if you want the basic version you can find it on SSR Gold Ship Stamina or Speed, and SR Hishi Amazon, which of the three is probably the best card to use; it is both a good training card, and also more reliably possible to obtain the skill from than either of the Gold Ship cards, especially the Speed one. For Late Surgers, you may want to pursue Slick Surge, available on SSR Vodka, Grass Wonder, and both versions of Winning Ticket (Power and Guts).
How to Make Good Decks With Limited Cards
Possibly more important than anything else is knowing what deck you can make with what you have available. Although the recent Global server economy has been increased, it is still fairly hard to obtain enough SP to level Support Cards, and unless you have performed numerous pitys worth of rolls (20 per banner), having a good selection of Support Cards can be difficult and also potentially frustrating; I’ve mentioned in a few other guides that many content creators write their guides based off of accounts with huge amounts of money poured into them, and when your trainees don’t live up to the standards those content creators put out as “mandatory”, it makes it feel as though you’re doing something wrong, when it reality it is more a question of resources over skill.
When selecting cards for your decks, you should always look to prioritize MLB levels; as mentioned above, Best Available, Necessary, and Skills is the priority you should go in, and although a card may not provide the best skills you need (such as a Speed card focused on Pace Chasers while training an End Closer), things such as Friendship Training bonuses, Mood multipliers, and Specialty Priority can make a huge difference when you’re pursuing huge stat numbers; the more often a support card shows up to your training, the better bonuses you’ll receive, especially as that training itself levels up over time. Something else to remember is that while SR or R cards may not always have as good stats or bonuses, they’re better than nothing.
There are also a few free cards that players can pursue. You can also obtain a free copy of Winning Ticket’s Power SSR from watching the Episode 3 campaign, and using club points you can level it up without having to use carats, which will at least provide a free SSR Power Card to utilize. The SSR Stamina cards, McQueen and Rice Shower, are also fairly good, although for Cancer Cup you’ll find they don’t have overall great performance and utility (but it is at least worth knowing). Finally, Haru Urara’s free Guts card provides no actual skills, but she is an amazing stat stick, and her Friendship Training multiplier will allow you to obtain fairly great bonuses to stats that she shows up to train with, although since that’s a bit of a crapshoot, you’ll have to adjust to the fact that her showing up on a stat you want is a lucky occurrence rather than a reliable trigger.
As much as decks tend to be loaded towards certain stats in many guides, a more varied and diverse deck of MLBs can produce solid results, although it requires careful planning and the acceptance that you will likely have numerous bad runs in which people don’t show up when you need them. The reason that Speed Stacking or Stamina Stacking “works” is that you are essentially gambling your entire run on the few times that all of your Support Cards show up on their specialty stat at the same time, either during Summer or late game when a training is levelled up, giving you huge numbers like 60, 80, or even 100 in a stat. The issue is that you are more than likely to get 20 in a stat than 100, and expecting that to happen constantly is extremely unhealthy for your patience with the game. So, building a diverse deck, such as 2/2/2, or 2/2/1/1, can produce similarly successful trainees, and is sometimes very successful for parent runs.
Also, while Guts tends to be considered a wasted stat or “bad” investment, Cancer Cup does actually want your trainee to have 300 of it, and there’s quite a few Guts cards that we’ve discussed that have desired skills, such as Grass Wonder, Winning Ticket, and Air Groove. Some Support Cards provide your trainee with extra starting stats, and selecting Guts cards that provide a boost to your Guts can help you not only hit 300, but also perhaps give you a skill you want, meaning that overlooking them due to the stat being “bad” is never a great idea.
Another suggestion is that Friend Cards, especially Tazuna, can be extremely valuable to runs for “moody” trainees, because her events often provide free Mood Up events and restore energy. The way Friend cards work is that after training with them enough, their Friendship Gague hitting Orange unlocks Recreations you can do with that specific Friend. Each of these events restores a lot of Energy, provides other benefits like free stats, and can even cure negative ailments like Night Owl or Slacker; Tazuna is the better of the two available, but either her or Kiryuin are good choices if you want to smooth out your runs; they also provide end of career stat boosts that rival those of the Chairwoman if the card bond is maxed, as a final reward to using them.
Wit Cards are another “deck smoothing” tool; Wit training always restores at least 5 energy, and Wit cards can provide even more of it, as well as the bonus to Wit gains; as a note, you’ll want at least 400 Wit anyway, so having a Wit card can make that a very easy goal to hit once your frequent Wit trainings start returning dividends of 20 or more each time when Friends show up to it. Also, the usual “technique” of maximizing runs in Career mode is to avoid Resting as much as possible by taking Wit training instead, so Wit cards that provide extra Energy recovery bonuses can make avoiding Resting more. Of them, SR Daiwa Scarlet is a great choice, because many of her training event encounters also restore a decent amount of energy.
Practice Makes Perfect Parents and Trainees
While this list provides good target cards to include in your decks and how to approach making successful decks for the Cancer Cup, something that’s worth considering is that much of the game relies on RNG, and there are numerous cases in which even a perfect deck will result in subpar results due to RNG; sometimes, people just literally won’t show up for anything but Guts or Wit training, and there’s nothing you can do about it even with the best deck money can buy.
When it comes to raising Parents, this can be even more frustrating because the hunt for anything other than 1 star Guts sparks requires multiple runs, often simply grinding away and hoping for good outcomes. Just remember that this can be useful practice, as you begin to learn the ups and downs of every trainee’s career, and there are less and less random chances to be sidelined by certain events; a great example of this is Narita Taishin, who before the Kikua Sho will receive -4 Mood and Practice Poor, with very little that can be done to prevent it. However, knowing that it is coming and loading your deck with cards like Tazuna can provide some relief from this, reducing the damage the event does to a run.
Perhaps the best overall advice to give while you train for the Cancer Cup, or in general, is that Umamusume is a game about patience and moderation more than it is anything else, especially in the limited Global environment. With only 3 Friend borrows available a day, it can become frustrating to try training “good” Trainees when you only get 3 chances, and 2 of them are blow outs due to bad runs. Pursuing Parent runs, however, can help you avoid this issue, and using solid Support Decks can make those Parent runs more stable, in turn making it easier for you to train your own racers when you don’t have to rely on borrowing people.
Next time, we’ll discuss the best possible trainees you can use for Cancer Cup, but until then, 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 Tokyo Turf!
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