How Bad is the Power Creep?

The scenarios definitely power creep each other. They want you to always be playing the most recent few scenarios, with more stats, higher caps, better skills, and so on available in the more recent ones. Sometimes they’ll be distance specific, like GFF being for Sprint/Mile umas and then Mecha being for Med/Long, but for the most part you’ll be playing the most recent scenario if you want to make the best umas. Though, this does mean skipping a scenario isn’t a big deal.

On the left is an uma made by an active competitive JP player with some of the most recent powerful cards in the DYI scenario, the eleventh one. On the right is an uma I trained with cards from Kitasan and before. I’m no DYI expert, this was actually my first DYI run (though it is quite similar to URA in gameplay) so you might be able to push it higher with more experience. As you can see, the stats aren’t all that different. I brought two Speed cards instead of including a Guts card, while the others are comparable.

But, the big difference is in the skill quality. I actually ran out of skills to buy on this Dober. She ended with 5200 SP, and I had to buy various Sprint, Mile, Medium, Long, Late, and Pace skills just to spend them all. They’re all over the place. The ones she has bad aptitudes for contribute less score on top of, of course, being useless in actual races.

Even of the useful skills, there are obvious improvements. Super Creek gives a gold heal, but Shakur (the Stamina on the left) gives a gold heal that also provides a speed boost. Some support cards even give two gold skills these days, and/or let you choose between two options.

But, overall, I’d say it’s not too bad. If I wanted to catch back up, it would be about 6 months of playing. Cards worth pulling tend to last 4-12 months before being replaced by better options. Though, Creek is somehow still usable as a second Stamina card.

On the Uma side, I stopped playing during Grandmasters, and apparently I still have good enough umas to raise for the competitive events, if I updated my cards. The top tier umas get replaced frequently, but the “good enough” ones remain good enough.

One of the competitive players gave me the lists of umas they used in the past year of Champions Meeting events, which is seen as the most competitive PvP format:

2000m Tokyo Jungle Pocket (2 months old), TM Opera O (42 months old), Yaeno Muteki (28 months old)

2500m Nakayama Ball Seiun Sky (31 months), Valentine’s Mihono Bourbon (33 months), Christmas Mejiro Palmer (11 months)

2400m Hanshin Mecha Narita Taishin (1 month), Win Variation (new), Satono Crown (12 months)

1600m Hanshin Yamanin Zephyr (28 months), Bamboo Memory (30 months), Durandal (5 months)

3200m Kyoto Orfevre (1 month), Win Variation (4 months), Narita Taishin (48 months)

2400m Tokyo Orfevre (3 months), Loves Only You (new), Neo Universe (26 months)

“I very easily made A finals in all of those, won some of them, and the old umas contributed to all of those instead of just being fodder.”

Don’t use this as a guide for what umas to pull, but rather as more evidence towards pulling what you like instead of chasing meta umas.