Although PVP Champions Meetings come and go, one of the constant ways to test your team of racers against others is Team Trials, an aspect of the game that has been available since launch, and is part of players daily rotations. The biggest issue with Team Trials is that it doesn’t exactly explain what makes for a good team or set of trainees, and it also doesn’t explain how it differs from regular races; in fact, Team Trials is sometimes fantastic practice for PVP in some sense, but in many cases, Team Trials is its own thing that has a particular meta and set of best practices in order to obtain consistently high results and remain in higher grades to avoid demotion.
Before getting into our guide for Team Trials, if you’re new to Umamusume, we highly recommend you check some of our other guides like Career, Support Decks, Inheritances, and much more, as well as a quick overview on Team Trials we put together when the game launched. One of the biggest reasons to visit Team Trials now from a guide perspective is that the November balance update changed how many skills work and interact, and as we’ll learn shortly, skills have an incredibly high value in Team Trials, just not in the way you might initially expect.
Team Trials Overview
Team Trials operates by asking you to create a team of racers across the various distances and turfs: Sprint, Mile, Medium, Long, and Dirt (which is also a Mile). New players are restricted to one trainee per racing style, but eventually players earn the ability to put up to 3 racers in each contest in order to see who comes out on top, meaning that a fully developed roster of racers will 15 trainees, all of which you (preferably) want to have trained properly for the best possible results.
Players will receive a score that correlates to the generalized “power” of their racing team, a metric that is sometimes opaque and not inherently clear as to what determines it, but the short story is that it is a combination of trainee stats (as in, what letter grades they are) and the skills they have learned, as well as any aptitudes and how they interact with their ability. The game offers to make players a team automatically, which at first is fine, but you may find as you play the game long enough that the Umamusume auto-selector does not really know what makes a good team, and is just comparing raw numbers that don’t translate well (which can be frustrating when you are wondering why your team is losing to opponents who are 20k points below you).
As you compete, players can get promoted to various classes, ranging from Class 2 (the lowest from 1, where you start) to 6, and getting promoted to a higher rank rewards you with Carats and Friend Points. The amount of Carats is not inconsequential either, totalling 3000 just from promotions (enough for 2 ten pulls). Retaining your Class rating every period (Every 6 days, so weekly) offers 250 Carats to retain Class 6, meaning that staying at Class 6 for a month is an easy 1000 Carats. It is fairly easy to rise through Classes just from playing consistently, but staying in Class 6 is difficult, at least without some help from our guide!
How to Win in Team Trials
If you’ve followed our PVP guides for Champions Meetings in the past, you may think that raw stats and specific skills are all that is needed to win in Team Trials, but that isn’t exactly correct; thinking that you need 1200 Speed and 1000 Power in a Sprint is still a good idea, and your high level trainees will often return fairly good results early on is absolutely true, Team Trials has an odd method of calculating who wins and why that is not entirely reliant on stats in the way that other racing events are.
Instead, Team Trials actually uses a points system that determines winners, and while coming in First (and Second and Third!) will give you a lot of points, Skill Activations contribute a lot of points, as well as being well positioned in the race does. This generally means that Team Trials trainees want high Wit, possibly higher than normal trainees may want. Average Champions Meeting racers want 400 wit at minimum (except for Debuffers), but Team Trials competitors generally require 400 at the absolute bare minimum, and very likely want far higher Wit to ensure that consistent Skill activation translates to points. This also means that trainees will want Green Skills (So, if you’re familiar with training Front Runners with Groundwork, this may be familiar). High quality skills (Gold) are worth more points than basic skills, so if possible, numerous consistent gold skill activations will provide more points than basic skills.
An interesting quirk about Team Trials is that winning races will net you more points, but your overall “points” is what determines your Class, meaning that you can actually lose every single race against an opponent and still get promoted or retain a high class. Ideally you want to win your races, but don’t worry about it too much if you don’t! Focus instead on promoting yourself from Class 2 to 6, and then staying in Class 5 or 6 for maximum carat returns every week. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for trainees who have high wit, access to numerous green skills that will activate early, and then look to learn numerous Gold skills, as well as ensuring that your trainee has good stats in the race category you are looking to place them in; for example, remember that Sprint racers want high Speed and Power, while Long racers want high Stamina and Speed.
Support Card Bonuses: Don’t Get Fooled!
When competing in Team Trials, you may notice that you will see a note called “Support Bonus” which often has a % number attached to it. This total increases for every Support Card you own that is levelled to at least 20, and can increase your Support Bonus to a maximum of 50%. This might make you think that it would be worth it to rush to level all of your cards to 20, but the important thing to remember here is that SP and Monies are not particularly easy resources to farm, even with some of the increased rates for Global Players, and hurling mountains of both of them at your Support Cards just to increase your Support Bonus is not worth it in the end.
Instead, it is worth it to consider this as a passive bonus to your racing that can help you retain your Class ranking easier, giving just an extra bump; focus mostly on levelling your SSRs and SRs as they approach MLB and less about trying to make every single card you own at least level 20; while R cards may be fairly cheap to level, there are a lot of them, and the investment is only worth it if you have literally nothing else to spend SP and Monies on and are sitting on an absolute mountain of them.
That said, there is at least a slight passive benefit to this number, which is that the free SSRs and SRs you can earn from events also count as you level them up, meaning that even if you are saving your pulls for various cards (Such as the upcoming Kitasan Black rerun), new cards will filter into your possession and make it easier to raise your Support Bonus simply by expanding your collection that way; this also is usually helped by the fact that trying to complete events encourages you to run Career mode using cards that are related to the event, so levelling those cards to use them during an event will in turn net you passive Support Bonus during Team Trials (which, as you may have noticed, Events also generally want you to run a lot of). Consider Support Bonus as a passive, ever increasing bonus that makes it easier for you to maintain your Class rating in Team Trials, while also encouraging you to play, evolve, and grow your deck collections and use your resources effectively when you have them.
Effective Team Trial Trainees
Due to the November balance change, Team Trials trainees have become quite a bit more diverse than before, although there are still numerous trainees that operate at a far higher level than most when it comes to Team Trial composition. One of the hardest parts of Team Trials is nailing down effective trainees in each space, and also realizing that you will actually need Dirt trainees to make sure that you are not throwing away an entire category; even as we approach 6 months of Global release, there is still a fairly small amount of native A Dirt aptitude trainees, meaning that Haru Urara remains one of the most effective and efficient trainees in your roster, if only because she can help you pass on Dirt aptitudes to trainees for Team Trials.
Racing Styles can also be important, but require a bit of familiarity with how they work. For example, Front Runners want to be in Front, but the also require other racers who challenge them to keep the lead; for the most part, Team Trials makes this less punishing than Champions Meetings because of the presence of NPC racers to round out the 3 on 3 aspect, ensuring that there are usually at least 1 or 2 more racers in each position during a Team Trial race.
Some Trainees that are exceptionally useful are those that can adapt to various types of races, styles, and turfs without much investment, also allowing you to round out weaker parts of your team depending on what you need; note that you can only use one copy of a trainee in your team, meaning you can’t have the same trainee twice (and that also counts for alternative versions of trainees; you can’t run Tokai Teio and Anime Teio, for example).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, trainees that have been mentioned in many of our Champions Meeting guides are the “Best” trainees you can utilize here, so some names will be familiar to those of you who pay attention to this column:
Sprint: Sakura Bakushin O, King Halo, Curren Chan, Hishi Akebono, Silence Suzuka, Air Groove
Mile: Oguri Cap, Silence Suzuka, Taiki Shuttle, Maruzensky, Vodka, Grass Wonder, El Condor Pasa, Seiun Sky, Summer Maruzensky, Daiwa Scarlet
Medium: Oguri Cap, Daiwa Scarlet, Agnes Tachyon, Mejiro McQueen, Tokai Teio, Anime Teio, Narita Brian, Gold Ship, Seiun Sky, Summer Maruzensky
Long: Oguri Cap, Gold Ship, T.M. Opera O, Meisho Doto, Matikanefukukitaru, Super Creek, Mayano Top Gun
Dirt: Haru Urara, Oguri Cap, El Condor Pasa, Smart Falcon, Agnes Digital
You may have noticed a specific trainee pointed out more than the others: Oguri Cap. The reason for this is that Oguri Cap is an exceptional all-rounder trainee who can perform in 4 of the 5 categories, and requires very little investment in order to do so effectively; she runs at Turf A and Dirt B, Mile and Medium A, and Long B, as well as Pace and Late A. It is very easy to push Oguri’s aptitudes to A in Dirt and Long, and she can fill just about any hole in your team with ease, depending on what race and style you need help with. This is one of the reasons why the initial selector ticket considerations value Oguri Cap over any other trainee available, and if you pick up the game or have one of those selector tickets available, you may want to consider Oguri Cap just for the flexibility she brings to your roster.
Don’t Sweat Your Performance, Just Play
While it may seem like Team Trials wants you to specifically make a perfect team to challenge other players, you really don’t interact with them as directly as you do in Champions Meetings; not only are there no trophies and other types of prizes, but most players do not look at, see, or care about individual rankings. Instead, Team Trials is important to helping you build a passive Carat income, and doing well in it is what matters, which means 1, hitting Class 6 ASAP, and 2, staying at Class 6 is the second most effective way to earn the most Carats in a month to completing your dailies every day; it may even actually be the most effective, as full dailies require a lot of investment, while Team Trials can be completed in a few minutes once your team of trainees is done.
Also, in Team Trials, you can control your racers moods and even the weather; if you have the items and want to manipulate things, you can use Parfaits to give your trainees all great moods and even make it rain or shine, allowing you to play to the skills and styles of trainees that you have on hand (since it only impacts user side, this has no impact on other players). 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, see you out on the track!
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
