How to Win

The biggest factor for winning is acceleration. Acceleration is extremely powerful when it triggers at a good time. For example, a 3s duration gold speed skill on 1600m would give a gain of 1.68m. Seiun Sky’s unique skill gives a gain of 10.3m. Thus, the meta revolves around what umas have good acceleration skills.

You should also strive for an S aptitude in the distance, as it gives +10% Speed. This helps Front Runners maintain their lead and helps the other styles catch up. Speed greens are also useful for the same reason.

Building Front Runners

The key skill for Front umas is Groundwork. It gives them acceleration at the start of the race after activating three skills, which lets them take the front position. To activate this, you get three greens that suit the track. You can also use Focus or Concentration, but unlike greens, it doesn’t have a 100% trigger chance. When making Front parents, aim for Groundwork white sparks, because it’s a bit of a troublesome skill to get otherwise.

Seiun Sky’s unique is the other key acceleration skill and is basically what makes Front Runners a viable PvP style at all. It works when the last spurt starts on a corner. In order to activate it, you must be in first place, so you should focus on stacking middle leg speed skills in order to keep your lead. Skills like Professor of Curvature, Mile/Front Runner Corners, Summer Maruzensky’s unique, Tail Held High, Escape Artist, and so on.

All Medium and Mile G1 tracks start their spurt on a corner. All Long G1 tracks start their spurt on a straight. In Long, you can use Kitasan’s unique instead.

Front Runners highly value having a strong Wisdom stat, as it increases their speed early in the race and helps them activate all of their skills.

Defeating Front Runners

Front Runners must be first in order to use Seiun Sky’s unique. If they activate it, it becomes much harder for other styles to catch up to them. If it’s Seiun Sky herself and not someone using an inherited version of her unique, it’s extremely difficult.

This is where Seiun covers come in. This type of uma doesn’t try to win, it just tries to stop the other Front Runners from using Seiun Sky’s unique. To do this, you focus on capping Power and Wisdom while mostly ignoring the other stats, just getting enough to finish the training. A statline like 600/400/1200/200/1200 is fine here. You then stack on as many middle leg skills as possible to try to keep in front, and/or throw in some debuffs.

Summer Maruzensky is good for this on every track, as her unique always activates in the middle. Bakushin and Smart Falcon are other good choices, with V.Bourbon also being an easy option. Their Distance aptitude only has to be D or better, as their speed in the last leg isn’t important. You’ll rely on your other umas to win.

Building Pace Chasers

All of Pace Chasers’ good acceleration skills are on the Final Corner or Final Straight.

If the last spurt starts just before the final corner or early into it, then Maruzensky and Taiki Shuttle’s uniques will be useful for accelerating. If it’s late into the final corner, Nishino Flower’s unique is good.

If the last spurt starts just before the final straight or early into it, then Nishino Flower’s unique is good, and to a lesser extent H.Creek’s.

Pace Chasers also have an acceleration skill for downhills. These are good on Kyoto Medium tracks.

Building Late Surgers

Late Surgers are a big dice roll. They have a lot of acceleration skills, but none of them are really consistent. As such, the strategy is simply to take as many as possible and hope one of them works.

The general accelerations are On Your Left!, Mejiro Ryan/Dober’s unique, Feel the Burn!, and the Burning Spirit PWR skill. On Your Left! can be acquired from the Nice Nature SSR, which you should borrow if your uma doesn’t already have it (Gold City, Grass Wonder at level 5). Feel the Burn! and the Burning Spirit PWR skill can both come from the Aoharu Scenario.

Mejiro Ryan’s unique is the same as Seiun Sky’s. It has the same activation point, however, it requires you to be 6th instead of 1st. As such, you don’t want your Late Surger to get too far ahead, so your speed skills will mostly focus on the last leg. Gold City’s unique is another possible acceleration, and El Condor Pasa (Fantasy) and Mayano Top Gun (Bride) sometimes work too. Mejiro Dober’s is often the same as Ryan’s, but allows you to be 5th as well.

There are some others on specific tracks. For Mile, there’s Furious Feat, which you can get from the Oguri Cap SSR. Vodka also has it at level 5. For Dirt, there’s Trending in the Charts! from the Agnes Digital card. In Medium, there’s Rise from the Ashes(?).

Building End Closers

End Closers have a lot in common with Late Surgers. You can mostly refer to that section, though they can’t use On Your Left!.

In exchange, they get Straightaway Spurt / Encroaching Shadow, which is an acceleration skill on straights during the last spurt. If the last spurt starts on a straight or shortly before one, then this skill is useful. The gold version is currently exclusive to Narita Taishin.

Building Debuffers

Many people will make umas that just barely pass the stamina requirements for the track in order to get more stats elsewhere. Such people are prime targets for debuffers. They’re especially potent in Medium or above.

Each gold stamina debuff lowers stamina by 3%, with whites lowering it by 1%. On Medium distance, Nice Nature could lower the stamina of a certain style by 8% on her own. Gold recoveries are +5.5% for reference.

You can also debuff their speed. Gold speed debuffs give -0.25 m/s, which is equivalent to a negative Medium Distance Corner ◎ skill. The “Hesitant” skills are -0.15 m/s, which is the same as a negative white speed skill. The debuffs are always good.

These umas are quite easy to raise, so if you’re lacking time or don’t want to put in the effort to make a third good uma, a debuff build could be the way to go. Wit is all that matters, so 500/300/900/300/1200 is a perfectly fine statline for any distance. Focus your debuffs on the roles that the strongest umas for the track are in (usually Front Runner and Late Surger).

See the Debuff Builds section for more details.

Building Christmas Oguri

Christmas Oguri is so unique she gets her own section. Her unique has acceleration, and it triggers after using three recoveries. So, you can decide where to activate her unique based on the recoveries you bring. High Wit is very important for her consistency.

On distances from 2000 to 2500, Triple 7s can be used. It triggers after spurt start on 2400 and 2500, but is still very strong. On the Kyoto Mediums, you could also make her a End Closer and use a downhill recovery. If there’s an uphill, you can be a Front Runner and use the uphill recovery.

If the spurt starts on a corner, and that corner is the first corner after the halfway point, then you can use U=ma2 (Agnes Unique) as a Pace Chaser. If it’s the final corner, you can use Super-Duper Climax! (Urara Unique) as a Late Surger or End Closer.

When nothing else works, you can gamble by having all three of your recoveries be phase_random, e.g. Race Planner, Gourmand, Burning Spirit STA, and Super Creek unique, or you can use Drain for Rose (Halloween Rice unique) as a Pace Chaser.

As a Late Surger, A Small Breather can be a fallback plan in case one of your other three recoveries don’t activate. If it triggers early, you’ll get the accel, and if it triggers late, at least you get some speed. First Star is also decent on any style, but can trigger early in some cases.

Spurt Speed Carry-over

Speed skills increase your top speed. When the last spurt starts, if you have a speed skill active, you’ll have a slight headstart on your acceleration. It’s like you accelerated that 0.15m/s early. Even if the speed skill ends 0.1s later, since they only affect your top speed, it won’t lower your speed. This gives some extra power to speed skills that can activate at the proper time for this.

Normally, you’ll accel from, say, 20m/s to 25m/s. Starting with a skill active means you’re accelling from 20.15m/s to 25m/s. You could also think of it as, the speed skill’s duration is increased by the amount of time you spend accelerating.

Here’s a comparison of the meter gain from various types of skills, assuming the speed skills are active during the spurt and the accels last until you reach top speed.

Skill Type	Distance Covered	Gain	Notes
Base	207.46m / 9.43s	-	-
White Accel	213.50m	+6.04m	also inherited accel unique
Gold Accel	216.62m	+9.16m	also non-inherited accel unique
White Speed	208.84m	+1.38m	also inherited speed unique
Gold Speed	210.63m	+3.17m	also speed unique
Dual Unique	216.61m	+9.15m	211.43m (+3.97m) when inherited

Consider also that, since the speed skills only need to be active for a very short amount of time, they can also give you their speed. For example, in 2000m, a 3s skill lasts for 6s. If a gold used up 5s before the spurt, that would be 0.35 * 5 = +1.75 additional meters. It has a bit more of an effect than that due to letting you start accelerating earlier, but it’s close enough as an approximation.

This is particularly important on tracks where Final Corner accels work, such as in Scorpio Cup where Late Surger McQueen was viable due to her unique’s speed carry-over.

Making a Team

In general, you don’t have to worry too much about synergy between your team. As long as they don’t actively work against each other, you can simply add the strongest umas you have.

Front Runners

There are two key things to keep in mind when thinking about your team composition. The details about why these are the case is related to Position Keep, but knowing the what is enough, you don’t have to worry about the why.

Front Runners perform worse when there is only one of them in the race. Thus, if you are relying on a Front Runner, you may wish to run two, particularly if it’s a track where Front Runners aren’t popular. The two will compete to keep the lead, making both of them run faster.
If there are zero Front Runners, one random Pace Chaser will get a huge buff, as the game will assign them to act as the Front Runner while maintaining their usual Pace Chaser stats. Thus, if you’re relying on a backliner, you may want a Front Runner on your team simply to make this possibility less likely. Or, if your Pace Chaser lacks the ability to accelerate while in first place (e.g., Maruzensky can ult from positions 1~5, but Taiki is only 3~5) you may also want a Front Runner.

But, if it’s a track where Front Runners are favoured, you don’t have to worry about any of this. The other players will likely bring one.

Supporters

Debuffers
Fairly obvious, using an uma to lower your opponents’ speed or stamina. On Sprint or Mile tracks, this will usually be a Speed debuffer. On Medium or Long, they can also debuff Stamina. End Closers are usually best for this in Sprint or Mile and Late Surgers in Medium or Long, but you can also use a Front Runner Debuffer to motivate your carry Front Runner.
Sacrificial Front Runner
If you’re using umas who need to pass someone, you can use a Front Runner with low stamina that dies in the final leg to trigger those uniques. They can double as a Debuffer.
Seiun Bully
If Seiun scares you, you can make a Front Runner built around preventing her from using her unique. This involves getting 1200 Power and 1200 Wit while ignoring Speed or Stamina. Stack up on mid-leg skills to try to take and keep the lead.

Unusual Strategies

Urara + McQueen

If you put Urara on a Turf track, she will fall so far behind that “distance_diff_rate” skills will be thrown into chaos. For this team, the important one is Mejiro McQueen’s unique, which has distance_diff_rate<=30. With an Urara in the back, she can activate this even if she’s a Late Surger or End Closer.

This strategy is most potent when McQueen’s unique lasts into the start of the Spurt. The speed carry-over is a big help. You can also inherit McQueen’s unique on other umas while doing this.

It doesn’t have to be Urara. You can specifically raise a debuffer to have 100 Power by failing Power trainings repeatedly in third year. Doing this on Grass Wonder for example lets you get Dominator to additionally debuff the enemies’ speed.

This also ruins some End Closer-specific skills and makes them impossible to activate, like Masterful Gambit (仕掛け抜群) and Sleeping Lion (眠れる獅子).