Uma Musume – Rivalry of Mares (G/Y) [08/30/2023]

Competition is healthy. It is in the nature of mankind to challenge one another and race to the top. As we do so, we come across other like-minded individuals, persons who always come close to us in skill who always neck and neck with us. These particular competitors are our rivals who seek to overwhelm us while keeping us accountable, ensuring that we are their bane as they are ours. Such is the relationship between mares Daiwa Scarlet and Vodka.

Scarlet and Vodka seen here are both the best of friends and bitter rivals always trying to outdo one another. In Weiss, they are represented by this swapping pairing. Both cards can bounce themselves to hand at the start of your climax phase and change into the other from hand. They have some key differences to note with their on-play from hand effects (they proc when they change since the change is from hand as well).

Daiwa has anti-event use during her battle with her opponents while Vodka has anti-backup use. Scarlet deals a single point of damage if you control other characters with her on-play effect. Vodka, on the other hand, is a healer.

How do we make use of the pair? Well, the witch doctor event above grants us power with the ability of drugs. Miss Sasami here boosts the power of our horses with her family-friendly concoctions. In exchange, her event provides one of two abilities. The first mode grants a horse an ungodly amount of power and two soul for the turn. The more important ability for our deck, the second mode, lets you reveal the top card of the deck and spawn it directly on the field if it is a horse.

Why is this so important, you might ask. Both Scarlet and Vodka have on-play effects from hand; however, since we are spawning them from the deck, these abilities are negated due to the different timing. However, their abilities also proc at the start of the climax phase, meaning if we have the other rival in hand, we can swap them in and still make effective use of the rival’s ability.

So what is our plan? We want at least one copy of each rival in hand the moment we reach level two. If we are able to keep the girls on field, we can continually swap them into the other to gain constant advantages through their on-play abilities.

Getting Scarlet and Vodka into hand is relatively easy since most early advantage combos are able to fetch characters. However, our biggest trouble is getting the event to hand more specifically. There is no bonder to the event so Seiun Sky above appears to save the day. Since Seiun Sky’s combo allows you to check the top three cards of your deck and add one to hand, we can potentially sneak the event into our hand outside of drawing it. Furthermore, as an added bonus, at the start of your encore phase, Seiun Sky allows you to pay a stock to forcibly draw and discard two, giving you an added chance at snagging the event. Choice as a trigger is also very good to help with fetching either of the rivals or getting extra stock for later use.

Another struggle with the deck lies with the restrictions placed on by the event and the set’s main mechanic, inheritance. Inheritance only works when placed from hand, and when cards are spawned by the event, they do not trigger the mechanic making any “inheritance” finishers obsolete. So then, what could be our game plan? Well, we will be ideally burning our opponent and out-resourcing them with Scarlet and Vodka. Our side plan will be with Pearl above. Pearl is a large beater that also has an extra soul. This is key since her first ability is a field condition effect rather than a play-from-hand effect. She’s large during both turns, making her likely to remain on board. Her combo gives us additional hand and punishes our opponent should they cancel, turning Pearl into a cross-turn 15000 powered beater. Pearl is a great secondary option to spawn should we not be able to grab our swapping rivals.

As our deck is primarily focused around spawning Scarlet or Vodka from the top of our deck, we want to have as many top checkers as possible. El Condor Pasa is a stock reverser for cost zero cards while allowing you to reveal the top to grant her a soul if the top card is a character. Rice Shower is a search Riki profile that also lets you rearrange your deck’s top two cards in any order. Lastly, Yukino Bijin lets you surveil twice on-play (we ignore her inheritance ability since this is not used).

To be able to spawn our rival mares, they must be in the deck. To ensure that we even have a chance at spawning them, we can use the two shuffle back cards above. Seeking the Pearl shuffles two characters back to let you pump power to one of your other characters for the turn, extremely helpful for our level one Seiun Sky combo. In addition, she reduces the power of one of your opponent’s characters in the front row when she swings, letting you potentially snipe away low-powered targets. Daitaku Helios shuffles two characters back to give her the ability to side attack without penalty. In addition, she lets you pay her cost to check up to the top three cards of your deck and add a card to hand.

Two more honourable mentions are the Teio and Vodka above. Teio is a burst-powered beater that has the nifty ability to potentially add hand upon reversing her opponent. Given the number of level two or higher cards in this deck, she carries a fairly high chance of gaining extra hand for free. She can grab any level two or higher card, so she is another way to potentially add the event to hand. Vodka is a burst-powered beater as well but with a double drop searcher ability that procs when played from hand and on attack, perfect for grabbing both level three Scarlet and Vodka and paying out any triggers.

Lastly, I want to mention Haru Urara above. She’s a level assist that lets you draw and discard a card with her act ability. Given that we want to keep Scarlet and Vodka alive, having power is crucial. Sweep Tosho is better in my opinion for her ability to rearrange the top two instead, but if you wish to use her, you’ll need more commitment to blue.

Backups are crucial for keeping Scarlet and Vodka alive. We can’t really do much with Adachi profiles, but we can try to contest for field. Eishin Flash is a memory kick counter, and Arden is a 2000 powered backup that refunds stock. Instead of Arden, you could opt to run Machikane Fukukitaru instead as a costless backup. I prefer Arden for the soul trigger specifically, letting you salvage her with choice triggers or to push for extra damage.

Fine Motion is an option for a brainstormer. Given the biggest difficulty is grabbing the event to hand, her check three, discard one ability on hitting a climax with her brainstorm increases our odds. Additionally, her discard ability when a climax is played can potentially filter your hand away and grab you the event (at your opponent’s discretion of course). Air Shakur is another option that’s a salvage brainstorm, but she does come with the bonus of having a surveilling ability when she’s played from hand. Kawakami Princess as a Pina profile is another option as well to cheaply keep your Scarlet(s) or Vodka(s) alive.

Do your best to gamble the odds and bring out the rivals. Keep swapping them back and forth and trample over your opponent. 走れ! 走れ! 走れ!