The Cancer Cup is now a thing of the past, which means that while completing the “Summer” event, you can also begin working on your Leo Cup Trainees! Last week we put out a general guide about the upcoming PVP race that will kick off towards the end of October. The Leo Cup presents a return to Medium Distance racing, which means that if you’re a returning PVP challenger, you may already have some idea of the types of cards that may show up in our list to help you out. But if you’re looking for alternative options, are a new PVP challenger, or simply trying to maximize your training runs heading into the Leo Cup, we’ve got a list of cards you’ll want to consider and skills that will help give you a leg up on the competition.
If you missed our guide last week, we have a preliminary guide for the Leo Cup that you can check out here. And if this is your first time hearing about Umamusume: Pretty Derby, we’ve got a full set of guides that can help you get started with the game, whether that’s Career Mode, how Inheritances work, Support Card decks, Potential Levels, and much more. We also have PVP guides that can help you better understand how PVP works in Umamusume: Pretty Derby and what to expect! Now, let’s get into the heart of the cards for Leo. As a note, SSR, SR, and R cards generally share skills, with the exception being that SSR cards tend to have the “best” skills (such as Gold Recovery skills), so if you absolutely need a skill but don’t have an SSR or even SR version, always consider running the R version if it is a more widely available skill.
Leo Cup: Basics and Green Skills
The Leo Cup is a Medium Distance race at 2200m, run on Hanshin Turf in Summer with Sunny Conditions and Firm turf from the Right-hand side using the Inner posts. Some of these keywords may sound familiar if you’ve been participating in Champion’s Meetings before, as many of them have had places in other races. If Leo is your first Champion’s Meeting, the keywords attached to the race speak to specific conditions that you can obtain skills for, known as Green Skills. Specifically for this race, you’ll want to track down the skill Non-Standard Distance, which is the first time a Champion’s Meeting has asked for this skill so far. Standard Distance is one of the more “available” skills, but Non-Standard Distance is a little less frequently found; the skill gives a Stamina boost in races that are NOT multiples of 4 (or, more specifically, 400), which the Leo Cup is at 2200m. There aren’t many Support Cards that provide access to this skill, so if it is one you want to hunt down for a skill like Groundwork to activate (we’ll talk more about that in a bit), your best bets are SR Mayano Top Gun, SR Meisho Doto, or SR Manhattan Cafe.
Hanshin Racecourse is a little bit more available, again providing a Stamina bonus for races held on that track, and can be found on SSR Nishino Flower, SSR Mejiro Palmer, SSR Gold Ship (Stamina or Speed), and SR Biwa Hayahide and SR Marvelous Sunday. Perhaps the nice thing about this skill compared to some others is that it is widely available across multiple stat type cards (Speed, Power, Stamina and Wit), so slotting one of these cards into your deck to gain access to the skill is fairly accessible to almost all trainers. The same goes for Firm Conditions, which gives a Power bonus to races held on firm ground; this skill is available across all SSRs of Winning Ticket (Guts, Power, and Stamina), SSR Super Creek, SSR Nishino Flower, SSR Satono Diamond, SSR Rice Shower, and SSR King Halo. You can also find the skill on SR Meisho Doto, same as Non-Standard Distance. There’s some nice overlap with other skills you’ll want for Firm Conditions, making it an easy skill to pick up even without trying (And you’ll likely be running Super Creek anyway). You can also find the skill on SR Seeking the Pearl, but as she doesn’t provide any other skills that you’re likely looking for, I’d suggest only using her as a last resort if you have no access to any other cards with Firm Conditions.
Right-Handed is one of the least available skills for Green Skills, only being available on SSR Fine Motion and SSR Narita Brian, as well as SR Matikanefukukitaru. That’s actually it, making it a very difficult skill to try and build your deck around, although all three of these cards are fairly good and worth considering for your deck. Summer Runner is even more restricted, only appearing on SR Fuji Kiseki, which means that unless you are trying to ensure that your deck has access to every possible Green Skill for the Leo Cup, you may want to put Summer Runner at a fairly low priority unless you don’t have much ability to obtain the other skills listed.
The final Green Skill is Sunny Days, which provides a Guts bonus. Guts still remains one of the least important stats in the list of other stats, but a successful racer does want at least 300 Guts to be competitive in Leo Cup. While this skill isn’t going to get you to 300 alone, it does provide 40 Guts at the basic level, which is a considerable amount. It is available on SSR El Condor Pasa, SSR Satono Diamond, SSR Hishi Akebono, and SSR Mejiro Dober. Unfortunately, none of these cards are particularly exceptional, and of them, SSR El Condor Pasa is probably the best choice if you were to include one of them, but then also it depends on if you are moving to include a Power card or not; the second best card in this list is SSR Satono Diamond, which does provide pretty okay Stamina gains, and Hanshin Racecourse, but as a warning has numerous Energy draining events that can impact your training runs.
The Groundwork Conundrum
If you competed in the Cancer Cup, you may be familiar with the skill Groundwork, a skill considered required for Front Runners to be competitive in the Champion’s Meetings from this point on in Umamusume’s meta. Groundwork functions by having your racer trigger at least three skills early race, and passive Green skills count as activated skills, meaning that most competitive front runners will be looking to obtain three Green skills and Groundwork as core parts of their kit. The Cancer Cup provided one of the first testing grounds for working Groundwork into skill builds, but it also presents an interesting and complicated problem for those looking to make Front Runners in Leo Cup (and longer distance races): The need for at least three Green Skills, Groundwork, and also the requisite Stamina Recovery skills, along with other desirable mid and late race skills one might want.
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 SSR 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. The other problem is that you may notice that none of these cards listed are any of the cards listed above for Green Skills except for SSR Speed Gold Ship, which remains a very weak and difficult card to utilize due to the huge pool of skills that it can possibly give you hints to.
A Front Runner focused deck is going to need at least one of the above cards, very likely SSR Stamina Gold Ship or Guts Air Groove, SSR Super Creek, and then Speed Cards to likely fill out the rest of the deck. This isn’t an impossible deck to do well with, and of the Green Skills above, SSR Super Creek does provide Firm Conditions, meaning that you’ll only need two more skills covered. SSR Nishino Flower and SSR King Halo make for very good options to provide Speed Supports, which still leaves room for the ever present SSR Kitasan Black to round out a deck with. You can also opt to shoot for Parents who have Green Skills or Grondwork you can inherit through Sparks, which may help alleviate the need to shove some of these into a deck to make things functional but not optimal.
Pace Chaser Deck Suggestions
If the fight for Front isn’t your bag, then there are quite a lot more options available to you for deck building. That said, Green Skills are always valuable, so it is worth considering grabbing them if you want the flat stats to help round out your racer. Otherwise, you’ve got a fairly open book of cards to choose from, now mostly depending on what you have available, and something that will be relevant to all other decks: Do you have a copy of SSR Super Creek yourself, or do you need to borrow one? Because if not, you’re going to need to fix that problem one way or the other.
Although this is applicable to essentially every Style, Super Creek’s Swinging Maestro is deeply important to Pace Chasers because of the Stamina penalty that Pace Chasers suffer from. Since their Style is built around overtaking Front Runners on the final corner, they surge with a burst of Stamina that drains their health faster than others, and on average pacers want 10% more Stamina than other positions due to this fact. So, using 800 as a baseline for Leo cup, your Pace Chasers will want to have around 880~ Stamina, and two Gold Recovery Skills (if not even some extra recovery like Lucky 7s or Shake It Out for a little extra recovery. Swinging Maestro remains the best universal recovery skill in the game, so that’s one gold that you’ll want to have.
Pace Chasers have access to another Gold Recovery, Gourmand, which is available from the SSR Special Week Speed card that was a free support card from the very first event in the game. Which means that if you didn’t get that card, you’re going to have to either train Special Week or Oguri Cap, and put them into Pace Chaser style. There is another recovery skill that you can pursue which is on the current Event SSR Power Daiwa Scarlet, called Race Planner. This is another Gold Recovery so ‘is it good’ is generally ‘yes’, although it isn’t perhaps as good as Swinging Maestro or Gourmand, but it can still be another option.
The main thing to remember is that Pace Chasers need Stamina, and Recovery skills are the best way to obtain it aside from lucking out with training or good inheritances, and even then you’ll still need them to help deal with the Medium distance and potential debuff builds from other racers (which is likely, as so far Global players seem to LOVE running debuffers and blockers, even if it costs them the race).
Late Surger and End Closer Options
Frankly, not much changes for Late Surgers and End Closers in this particular race from the advice we provided for the Cancer Cup, which I’ve included here: 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).
However, a few new things that you’ll want to consider is that there are some positionally important recovery skills that only these positions can use. End Closer has the most famous (or infamous) in Sleeping Lion, a Gold Skill that only Narita Taishin can access through Potential levels. Other trainees can still use the Blue version, Standing By, which is on SSR Gold Ship Speed or Stamina and SR Narita Taishin, and Gold Ship can also give access to the Blue Recovery skill After-School Stroll for Late Surgers. The final option for End Closer is Levelheaded, a skill that is only available from two places: SSR Air Shakur (the worst card in the game, so don’t do that) and SR Sweep Tosho, a Speed card with some great abilities in general. Late Surgers may also want to consider 1,500,00 CC, a skill that provides velocity on an uphill (Power) that is available from SSR Stamina Winning Ticket or SSR Tamamo Cross; of the two, Tamamo Cross is a better card, but use what you have available if you want that skill! You could also inherit it from Fantasy El Condor Pasa or Haru Urara as well.
Free Support Cards and Deck Considerations
Depending on how long you have been playing the global release of Umamusume, you should likely have access to a number of free Support Cards at this point. A misunderstanding about these cards is that they are generally thought of as being “not good” or “less good” than deep meta cards like Kitasan Black or Super Creek, but some of these cards possess skills that are not available anywhere else. If you’ve been playing since launch and participating in events regularly, you should have some level of the following cards: SSR Speed Special Week, SSR Power Daiwa Scarlet, SSR Speed Gold Ship, SSR Guts Matikanetannhauser (and SR Nice Nature), as well as SSR Wit Mejiro Dober. Many of these cards are fairly solid in terms of stats and training bonuses, and some, such as Special Week, have skills like Gourmand that you cannot obtain anywhere else.
Others, like Gold Ship, are not exactly “great”, but if they are the only option you have for certain skills (like Groundwork), then that is better than not having access to it at all! The biggest issue with these SSRs is that obtaining their LBs are tied to their events, so missing out on them from the event or not obtaining enough points does make them less effective depending on what LB level you have the cards at. Still, they are absolutely far better than “nothing”, and shouldn’t be overlooked especially if your overall deck list is lacking in SSRs or Limit Breaks.
Another option for free cards are those that come from Club Points, which you generally obtain through having your Umamusume trainees borrowed by other players, and also by participating in Clubs, trading shoes back and forth to one another. The cards available through Club Points are also tied to the Main Story episodes, so you have to watch/play through all of those to unlock the first copy of the card. These cards include Stamina Mejiro McQueen, Stamina Rice Shower, Power Winning Ticket, and Speed Narita Brian. All of these cards are quite useful, with fairly solid stats and good skills (And in some cases, the only place to get certain skills, like Narita Brian and Right-Handed).
The final free card you can obtain is by using Friend Points to pick up Guts Haru Urara. While the card itself does not provide any Skill hints at all, it is a very solid Stat provider for Guts, and Urara’s friendship training bonus makes her a great wandering Support. You’ll certainly want to ensure that your other cards are providing you with the skills you need, but Haru’s card can provide you with energy recovery, training bonuses, and Guts to pad your stats, so don’t ignore her either if you haven’t picked the card up yet using your Friend Points!
When building decks, either free or not, the final note to consider is that SSRs such as Kitasan Black are, simply, “better” than other cards. This is perhaps one of the more frustrating parts of the Umamusume experience as it certainly feels like you are going to have a harder time playing the game without good cards, but a very important note here is that these cards, either a single copy or MLB version, are not going to guarantee you a good trainee or even Career Run; they simply smooth the experience somewhat. But there are going to be Career runs where even the best deck in the world results in a flop out, and you aren’t going to be able to do anything about it.
When building your decks, focus on Speed, and subtract cards from that to fill the gaps you need. For example, you get 6 cards; start with the thought of “what 6 Speed Cards can I use”, and then start subtracting cards from that total to slot in skills or stats you want to build. “I need to have Gold Recovery,” so you include 2 Stamina Cards, meaning your deck is now 4 Speed, 2 Stamina. Perhaps you also want a specific Green Skill or you want access to a Wit support to help your Energy recovery, so your deck is now 3 Speed, 2 Stamina, 1 Wit, which is likely the “smoothest” deck you’ll get. When you see images of people posting +100 training events, keep in mind that it isn’t because they have expensive MLB decks, it means that they rolled high on the training events; for every +100 you may see, you are going to get 20 more trainings where not a single person you need shows up on the stat you needed them to.
Finally, do consider building your decks stacked towards certain stats; we currently are not in the era of Umamusume in which varied decks with cards representing each stat is a good idea for competitive trainees. If you are looking to raise a Parent to help your Leo cup training in general, all rounder decks can be ideal by focusing on clearing Career and obtaining the skills you want, but for a competitive racer, unless every card you use is a MLB that is best in slot, you’re still likely going to be better off stacking towards the dominant stat you want (so, generally, Speed except in Long races).
Medium Hard
Leo Cup returns to a style of training that first kicked off the Champion’s Meetings in the Taurus Cup, which is the difficult balance that Medium races require. Quite a lot has changed in the game since Taurus Cup (even if it doesn’t quite feel like it has been that much time in real life due to the accelerated game schedule), with numerous new strong trainees and support cards having been released between the two events.
Next time, we’ll discuss the best possible trainees you can use for Leo 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 Hanshin Turf!
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