two disclaimers:
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I did not actually spend money to do this; since it’s the 1.5th Anniversary, free pulls and currency are bountiful
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I do not endorse the act of gambling to win at gambling after creating a horse through several layers of gambling
4 Likes
hello
hi
after a debilitating defeat in a cup where I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and ended up running some fuckin’ weird horses, it was time again for the Scorpio Cup
the Scorpio Cup holds special significance to me as it was the first cup I took in group A. you may recall The Champ, who hilariously almost lost but she’s The Champ for a reason
this was the chance, we definitely had to repeat
except I went into the cup trying to celebrate No Neutral November by running three outrun horses because I am an idiot
one run in and it’s time to bust out the Actually Good Teams
which isn’t to say that we gave up on the escape life
L’équipe
Seuin Sky
class: Berserker
tactic: never stop never stopping
after being a key member of the team in the very first cup of the A+ era, the exact same Seuin Sky run from the sunny days of May is back for a revenge tour. see, although we easily made it to group A finals, Sky hit the 15-18% chance for a late start and ended up taking 2nd.
It’s her time.
neither RNG nor horse will stop her from getting what is rightfully hers
oh, I didn’t post about that cup.
Seuin Sky is the runaway horse. that’s the easiest and best way to put it. there are other horses who do the escape thing and a few of them have Big Escape, but Sky’s unique skill just makes her The One.
please refer to this detailed diagram explaining it:
if Sky is in first going into the last section of the race, she gets a hilariously large accleration bonus. big. huge. massive. I cannot overstate how ridiculous the effect of the skill is. she opens a giant gap wide enough to drive a train through and if horses aren’t prepared or already playing catch up, she’s just gone.
9 lengths? sure, that’s normal and fine.
this isn’t just a good skill, this is straight up meta-defining, to the point where trainers will breed other outrun horses with her for the skill. if I’m not running Sky myself, I’m running another horse out in front in case someone else is to try to block them.
you would need an absolutely well made or insidious and deranged horse in order to catch her once she’s off and away
Gold Ship
class: Assassin
tactic: being a menace
finally, after several months, I get to break out Summer Gold Ship. so, unlike Original Formula Gold Ship, New Gold Ship (or, Gold Ship 2, if you perfer) has a new unique skill, Adventure of 564 (the people who know are groaning at this).
okay, sit down, I need to explain this skill. no, I mean, I really need to explain it, and if you think this is bad, they had to put out a blog post explaining it when she got added.
okay so when you train your horse, between events, their inate skill selection and what you can get from SSR cards in your deck, you get skills. now, a number of skills in the game have rare, gold versions that are more powerful but also take up more rank budget (no we can talk about horse math later). and, as you know about skills, they need to meet some kind of condition to fire off.
Adventure of 564 enables Gold Ship to, when it activates, use upto two rare skills at the same time and regardless of their activation requirements. and when I say “regardless of their activation requirements”, I mean, you can have train in a skill for miler tracks or for other tactics you aren’t running (which is a way you could build her; you’d be guarenteed to have such skills fire off because she couldn’t use them normally) and the skill makes them go off.
she is effectively a ticking time bomb with the right skills
because I’m an asshole, I fucking go straight for number one stupid acceleration skill Non-Stop Girl, a skill with finicky activation requirements
thus, we get hilarity
the record so far is 4 skills at once
she will just decide to will a win into being and come from 10+ lengths and crush everyone in her way. she will overtake everyone. she will catch up to Sky. she is a menace.
also she has a bazooka
Mejiro McQueen
class: Bard
tactic: anime insert song
before I begin, there are 9 Mejiro horses in this game and fully one-third of them are Mejiro McQueen
and I have all of them
and so I didn’t pick Default Costume McQueen or Hangin’ Out on the Beach McQueen, I picked Anime Season 2 Tie-In Tiny Hat McQueen. and I chose her for one reason and one reason alone: if her unique skill pops off, the chorus to the opening of the second season of the anime plays for the rest of the race
that’s it
I did it to amuse myself
…at least, that’s what I thought. I slotted her in with Sky and Golshi and then, somehow, even though she wasn’t winning a lot, the team was unstoppable
so what started out as a joke accidentally became the missing piece of the team
fuckin’ horses man
so the cup was pretty uneventful aside from the couple of times I actually tried Team Outrun (they did okay) and some other dregs I had (I managed to put together a team that actually couldn’t win, it was great) but once I stumbled upon McQueen, it was like, easy 4-5 win runs in all the lower rounds. most of the time, it was Gold Ship just being, the absolute worst and stealing wins from everyone: her teammates, other horses, herself. McQueen would win every so often because everyone else fell asleep and she would go “well someone has to win” and Sky would keep doing her thing, which is try to stay in first except when she doesn’t.
so we get to the finals. I’m not expecting much other than Gold Ship doing some stupid bullshit. I look at the other teams and the race layout and oh my god why are there 4 horses in back, this pervert is running their whole team at the same tactic who would do such a crazy thing. Gold Ship is going to get stuck in the back with all that noise. McQueen isn’t around to win, she’s a cheerleader.
this is it.
It’s her time.
okay, great, we won, another shitpost in the can
…except last month, they added a whole song and concert for the winners, and of course, I didn’t watch it because I lost and losers don’t get concerts
I do not have the vocabulary to describe how utterly bizarre, insane and hilariously awesome Ms. VICTORIA is
all 9 horses take the stage and 2nd and 3rd place do backup vocals while the winner sings about how fucking awesome they are and the other horses dance and it’s like, you won 8 hypemen for your good/lucky horse
also it gets wild because it’s an idol concert and the URA spares no goddamn expense for their monthly horse girl concerts
and then at the end, the winner takes their place as the Jellicle Horse and ascends to heaven
I really wanted to make this a gif but I’m already shitposting 100MB of webms, I’m not throwing in a 40+MB gif
she did it. the team did it. 6 months of stewing on this and I can spit in the eye of RNG. stay tuned for next year when I try to three-peat as Scorpio Cup winner or something.
next post at some point: oh, they updated the original training scenario/mode. is this the end of horse racing for a third time this year?
17 Likes
hi
hello
it’s December, and that can only mean one thing. it’s time for the Arima Kinen, the horse race for the best and most popular horses
but this is a game trying to make money so, you know, it’s for everyone. everyone’s money is good in the eyes of the Lord (the Lord is Cygames, blessed be their RNG)
I’m ready for another repeat of last year’s performance
now, the Arima Kinen is unique in that it’s a long track but it’s the shortest a long track can be, at just 2500m, which opens up a whole host of possibilities for stupidity. this is also the first long track cup of A+ era, which I hate because Cygames are cowards and won’t subject us to that 3600m race that lurks in the race calendar in the campaigns
I’m ready to make another godawful team of horses to rage against the random number generator
Horsemas Team
Kitasan Black
well, Kitasan Black is a relatively new horse and
okay that’s a lie
even though, as a trainable horse, she’s only been in the game since the 1st Anniversary, as a character, she’s been in the game since the first event after launch, patterned after the second season of the show, where she and best friend Satono Diamond were featured as rate up cards and Fancy Hat McQueen and Racist Tokai Teio were the banner horses. and, well, if you cared about the game, I mean, cared about the game, you saw a lot of Kitasan. because it turns out her card was one of the first big meta cards in the game: speed card, absurd training bonuses, great perks from her card events and it gives out 弧線のプロフェッサー, the big corner speed button, the sacred meta speed skill above all speed skills
of course, you can’t run a card in your deck if you’re training that same horse. that’s just madness, you can’t be friends with yourself
so when training a horse whose card happens to give a Big Button, you have to get a little creative; either we sub in a card that will get us that skill or we go for a skill of roughly equal importance.
…or we do both
so we run Tokai Teio’s brain card from the Steampunk event banner (I am absolutely not making up the fact that there was a steampunk event), which is now the second card to offer 弧線のプロフェッサー, and the regular SSR Seuin Sky card, which is the only card to offer the outrun tactic skill 脱出術, a mid race boost. that way, if one card’s events don’t proc or if Sky decides to be an asshole and just give us the regular version of the skill, we have a backup.
we also need to give some attention to Kita’s unique, which is a big boost that goes off at the exact same spot that Sky’s does but also has looser requirements because it can go off if she’s in second as well. effectively, she can counter Sky
…except Sky isn’t the threat in this cup. it turns out the threat is everyone else running Kitasan Black
whoops I stumbled upon the one meta outrun horse for this format by doing a random run
by the end of the second day of round 1, I was sick of seeing this horse and I was sick of her dominance out front, be it in my favor or in others’.
also I was extremely upset that I screwed up my horse math (no we’re still not talking about this) and she could have been a tiny percentage point better than she turned out, but considering how often she put the other two idiots on the team on her back, I wasn’t complaining too hard.
also she’s like, a middle schooler or something? fuck man, I don’t know, time doesn’t make sense with the horse girls, don’t think about it
Gold Ship
she’s back again, her reign of terror must continue
I had a conversation about how fucking singlehandedly disruptive Swimsuit Golshi has been to the meta and went “lol I’ll roll another one for this cup”
it’s almost exactly the same idea as her build from last month, except now she has some skills for the long length format. otherwise she is exactly as stupid and potentially dangerous to the rest of the field thanks to the unique combination of conditions
Manhattan Cafe
this is a gloomy lookin’ horse, but she has two very important things that make her stand out from the roster:
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she is the only horse in the game so far with a gold long track length debuff, to the point where her first SSR card is the only card in the game with a gold debuff period
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she is the only horse to possess a +30% training bonus in a stat, hers being in stamina
the first gives her versatility in how we want to build her since we can make her more of a hybrid nuker/contender, go full nukes or just have a gun with a single bullet loaded as she runs around and the second mean we can completely eschew running stamina cards and just let the run-off stat build from power training give us the stamina we need (which, I’m going to level with you, I’ve been doing anyway because ever since the great Guts buff, stamina is more often than not the dump stat, just lol, she just need enough to get across the finish line in first, imagine training stamina)
and then I went and built her in the most headass fashion possible
it was this month that I learned to recognize the kanji for “overtake” or “pass” and realize that I had given her almost nothing but skills that activate on this condition. which means either she is constantly moving up and feasting or she is starving in the back and dying
I’m sure it’ll work out.
so the cup went pretty well, aside from the fact that I grew to hate the first and main member of my team because I was sick and tired of seeing her. group A in round 2 was a little rougher but I found the team that worked from the large pile of horses I trained for some reason, so we were sitting pretty.
so we get to the finals. of course there’s another Kita waiting in the front, along with an escape Daiwa Scarlet, so that’s already a red flag because we could easily be behind the other Kita in second and not catch up or just be pushed out of the top two altogether, completely neutering her.
the race goes as expected for the first half. I see Kita in second and I start getting nervous; if she sticks around in second, she won’t be able to make up the ground on the other Kita and we’ll have to rely on the horses in the back to function to win
we hit the last section of the race. Kita’s unique goes off and-
featured below is my real time reaction to this part of the race:
whoops I wasn’t paying attention and thought the other Kita was in first
(for your enjoyment since we’re light on multimedia stuffs this month: the whole damn race)
never forget that luck is a skill
because, friends, RNG has blessed us this month
Gold Ship is Ms VICTORIA
anyway, next month is going to be another 1200m banger, where the only winner is RNG and hilarity is the rule of the day. I’m looking forward to doing a detailed losing post
11 Likes
This is probably my favorite thread on SB
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3 Likes
hi
hello
it’s that time of the month where I see how small my horse brain is compared to other big horse brain trainers
the Capricorn Cup features a hilarious, stupid RNG fest of a race, a sprint totaling just 1200m of track at Chukyo on grass on a sunny day with good turf in a leftward direction
(these are important details for Reasons)
as featured in August, sprints are just absolute shitshows. madness rules the day. there are no bad ideas (mostly). if you throw enough crap at the wall, something will stick. and boy, do I fling a lot of it.
Team
Nishino Flower
plan: bet big on the straightaway
would you look at this heckin’ smol horse, she’s just the cutest little thing (she’s the shortest trainable horse in the game as of writing, at a tiny 135cm, or just under 4’6"). her tiny stature hides some fucked up shit in her kit: she has a 15% training bonus to speed and power, two stats she needs heaps of for her chase tactic; ハヤテ一文字, the gold level neutral straightaway speed boost; and her unique
my god, this horse
so, you’ve seen in the past few posts the strength of acceleration skills. but those were all longer races, where the effect of those is somewhat diluted by how long final stretches can be. on the course picked for this cup? in a sprint race, where the pack stays tightly clumped up all race? acceleration skills gain a bit more prominence because, well, the race is a minute long.
her unique is, roughly, if she’s contesting for the lead going into or coming out of the final corner (or, somehow, just on the final stretch sometimes, she’s a fucked up horse), she gets a big boost. a big boost. as good or better than regular Taiki Shuttle or regular Seuin Sky, except compared to those two, the conditions needed for it to fire off are much, much looser.
now, ハヤテ一文字 is a part of her kit and more often than not she’ll pop it coming out of her unique. but then we also run the speed Bakushin SSR card to get スプリントターボ, the gold straightaway acceleration skill for sprint races
I have placed every last egg into the “hope everything fires off at once” basket. because I am an idiot.
oh, also, Flower is one of the few female horses in the game. no I will not explain.
Hishi Akebono
plan: 
King Halo
plan: loadbearing horse
this is, uh, the exact same King Halo run what was on the team back in August. because I put her on the team and then suddenly Flower and Akebono functioned correctly and win rates went up.
I’d call her the glue that holds the team together but that seems in bad taste
at any rate, she did a very good job tanking all the bad motivation rolls in round 2 and I thank her for her service
okay so, the track, I need to talk about this for a hot second
so this is the in-race UI that show race progress. the race itself is kinda neatly divided into thirds. the track is roughly like this:
the way the splits are mapped onto the track kind of wreaked havoc with how certain skills played out. for instance, giving a horse Seuin Sky’s unique doesn’t actually work because the corner ends almost immediately, stopping it from activating. in comparison, Taiki Shuttle’s unique fires off slightly before the 2nd breakpoint, meaning she’s accelerating while still rounding the corner, thus losing some its potency. what we want is boosts in the long corner section to compete for position, acceleration coming into the final spurt and then boosts to jockey for first on the straightaway. Flower is good at this because she can pretty much activate during the entire last third and also I gave Akebono her unique because I am a pervert and went “no I want two Flowers on the track”
anyway, the finals. nothing matters, RNG rules the day, expectations are low. no late starts, good competition for position, King Halo is there I guess. we hit the last corner 5 seconds after the race starts and
huh
I’m going to level with you here, I don’t know how this happened.
Flower wins by… going fast.
the trainer who took 2nd sent a sticker expressing their anger and, my guy, I’m just as confused as you are, trust me.
lemme just make a future note here:
I for one don’t think they should raise her to heaven, she’s barely tall enough to hold onto the railing
real bunch of OSHA haters at the URA
BONUS
well I took the alt account out of cold storage and decided what I could do with little to no resources out of boredom
B-Team
Fuji Kiseki
joke: future sex offender
no, that’s actually kind of her joke. yes I know.
somehow the account pulled both regular flavor Sex Pest and Dance Event Sex Pest, where she abandons her masculine wiles for… well, dancing was already one of her gimmicks, so, uh
she has a big button for the last corner. I hate her.
Air Groove
joke: owner of one of the five braincells on campus
“hmm, I need a third horse and there’s no other candidates that I feel like doing. I’ll just take a horse that would require luck on goddess visits to get good enough at sprints and manifest my will through RNG”
it’s just that easy
also she’s racing in a bridal gown. don’t worry about it.
Taiki Shuttle
joke: Texan cowgirl from Kentucky
hey, all that stuff about how I said Shuttle didn’t gel with this track? wanna know why I know that?
the B-Team is Bad. they got into the upper bracket round 2 but couldn’t hash out 3 wins to get into group A finals. probably because I trained Shuttle bad. well, at least Kiseki and Groove are okay. okay-ish.
anyway, group B finals.
see, now there’s a finish that makes sense and
god, it had to be her, didn’t it. well, at least the two good horses did something while Shuttle was hanging out.
apparently B group gets Ms VICTORIA too. gotta say, not a fan of Kiseki’s singing voice. also she should be in jail.
please, don’t remind me.
next time: 2nd ANNIVERSARY
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(timestamped) this youtuber going from ‘i dont know what that is’ to ‘these all look like they’re from different things’ to 'pretty derby… ARE THEY HORSES???" is hilarious
3 Likes
I cannot imagine liking terrible things in the year 2023 and not recognizing Twin Turbo’s twisted, awful mug and insane design
good thing her nendo is out next month
(I can’t believe they’ve gotten this far into live service without adding Turbo as a unit)
meanwhile the McQueen figma is out in time for 2nd Anniversary and mine is currently making the trip over the ocean so she can be on my desk and be threatened by Rice Shower (who has a knife) and her nendo is currently up for pre-order and, well, I have to get that to join the Gold Ship nendo and then I have to snipe a Gold Ship figma in June and
why the hell I would I ever spend money on the game when I can spend money on the horses (I am planning on spending money on the game this month)
7 Likes
hello
hi
it’s the 2nd Anniversary of the horse girls phone app
two great, possibly expensive years of Lord Cygames accidentally creating compulsive gamblers out of gacha whales
it’s been a huge anniversary so far. first off, we’ve gotten yet another Mejiro horse (Mejiro Ramone) in card form, bringing the total to seven (this is ignoring that Mejiro Ryan got an event unit for Valentines Day).
also, Twin Turbo is finally here…
…as a 1-star unit. this might imply that she’s fodder but actually she has emerged as a kind of joke character where her base kit revolves around two things:
- running out in front and staying there
- sacrificing your life force to do the above
she also has a 30% training bonus to speed. she is a playable meme and you will either implode running her or get great triumph. also they added Mister CB but she’s not funny.
uh, Ignes Fujin got a new voice actor. I don’t know why I’m telling you this because there’s a 99% chance you, the reader of this post, do not know what she sounds like but, uh, she sounds worse now.
they buffed power, which I guess is also a buff to rear tactics. now if you go over the soft cap for power, your horse will get angry and get a power surge and try to push through crowds.
they added evolved skills. evolved skills are powered up versions of rare/gold skills. so, every fully-leveled up horse kit has two rare skills and now, if you meet a set of conditions (that they helpfully tell you about), you can power up skills to Go Even Further, and they’re even different among horses that share the same rare skills.
they added an entire goddamn new campaign. in a collaboration (in the phone game sense), Cygames has teamed up with Sega to provide a Star Horse 4-adjacent campaign, Grand Masters. in Grand Masters, you enter into VR training and are assisted by the virtual avatars of the three goddesses of victory:
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Godolphin Barb, goddesses of getting your bum ass friends to help you out
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Byerley Turk, goddesses of Big Training
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my queen, Darley Arabian, goddesses of GET HYPE
so the gimmick in Grand Masters is the goddesses are helping you out and by performing specific actions, you get favor from one of the goddesses, and these combine until you get a gift from one of them, and the gift is a bonus that is stupid and silly and equals big stats and buffs. so you’re not only encouraged to train or race, but also rest or hangout. and you use this to further in the goal of making your horse stupid.
so, once again, for the third time, this is it. the end of horse racing.
but also something else happened earlier in the month.
Aquarius Cup 2023
once again Lord Cygames has asked for your horse tax and made a dirt cup, but at least they made it a miler this time so the bar of entry is much, much lower. this cup also takes placing while it’s snowing so the dirt is also in bad condition and it’s not a sunny day.
it’s a gloomy cup but maybe we can whip us up a functional team
Cobano Rickey
Rickey is back because I don’t have Smart Falcon and want a horse up frontshe is a very good horse with a good kit. so the fun thing about her gold passive is that it doesn’t activate if you have more speed than power, so obviously there was only one thing to do:
yes it still activates with this. she is a horse without a single stat above 1000 in a shorter format, with horses regularly pushing 1100-1300 speed, and yet she manages to be the most consistent and good horse on the team. if she gets a gap going into the last corner, the race is hers easily.
Hokkou Tarumae
she is one of the random dirt-only horses they sneak into the banner line-up every so often. and when I say “dirt-only”, I mean it: her unique skill literally says it only activates on dirt courses. and, well
so she’s basically almost the same as Taiki Shuttle, down to her unique being a huge acceleration boost going into the final section of the race, though the activation condition is slightly looser (though she still has the problem of “I’m doing too good so I won’t go faster”). except she trades Shuttle’s miler-focused kit for dirt-exclusive skills
“why wouldn’t you just run Shuttle then?”
hey how about you shut up
also her joke is that she became a horse girl racing idol to promote tourism to her sleepy rural town. you guys like locadols, right
El Condor Pasa
horse girl daughter of a luchador! she speaks slightly broken Japanese, perhaps on purpose as a joke! she owns a bird of prey and keeps it at the school! she wears a mask! she’s contributed heavily to the lore that horse girls are actually unimaginably powerful compared to humans and that horse racing as a sport is a thing to keep them from destroying humanity with their unfathomable strength! she likes hot sauce!
her signature move and finisher is a backflip off the turnbuckle into a flying body splash (no this is 100% actually serious)
she’s on the team because she makes the team function.
honestly the lower rounds are pretty uneventful, and I stumble upon the team just trying random combinations out and seeing what works.
the final though, I see what the other trainers are running and I am spooked. there’s a lot of danger horses lurking about: Oguri Cap, Inari One, El Condor Pasas that aren’t mine (somehow I am not worried about Taiki Shuttle, because I have learned that I cannot depend on her).
Rickey is pushing out in front on the last corner, being the sole outrun horse in the race, and Tarumae is trying to recover from her late start out of the gate even now:
half a length huh. it’s fine, we’ll get 'em next time. maybe.
the best part of anniversary so far? pulling on the 2022 horse banner and having both of the 3-stars that pop up be dupes. 23 bucks well gambled.
next month’s cup looks like it’s going to be real dumb because now evolved skills are in play and the top sicko minds will be out in force. I can’t wait!
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Like the actual bird kind or the klingon kind or is there some kinda wild horse girl kind
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Disappointed the mask doesn’t offer more coverage but I guess it’s a symptom of the times we living in, can’t blame someone for wanting to show just a little bit more, wouldn’t be my approach if I was a horse girl though (sorry horse girls, not judging, just have my own misterioso aspirations)
5 Likes
The horse girls have betrayed Family Mart and are now sponsoring 7/11. I have been unsuccessful seeing any of their special baked goods and of the 12 special items at 7/11 the only ones I see are the yakisoba and cup noodle. The rest always looks like a hurricane run on the store.
I’ll eat an artifically flavored carrot donut yet!
3 Likes
are there any horse girls who wear blinkers?
also, sorry if you explained this already, but how do the cups work? is it that you can only try once and you have to get thru several rounds or … ?
I understand this is disappointing but I can reassure you that her casual dress is a polo shirt
the closest we have are stylistic recreations (like Gold Ship’s ear cups coming off her hat) or… the three horse girls who canonically wear glasses (level 5 brain training with a friend always shows your horse wearing glasses but that’s more of a “lookin’ smart!” joke, where as Biwa Hayahide, Ikuno Dictus and Zenno Rob Roy wear glasses) (no I cannot explain how the glasses stay on their faces if they do not have human ears) (yes the glasses have normal temples) (yes they race with the glasses on)
the break down of a cup roughly works like this:
- towards the end of a month, the exact track and conditions of the forthcoming cup are announced on the update stream and in the in-game news menu
- three days before the cup begins, signups open. you can enter in either the limited league (which has an upper rank limit) or the open league, which has no limit on the rank of horses you can enter
- a cup lasts roughly 5-6 days. the first two days (round 1) are a free-for-all open bracket, the next two days (round 2) break out the field into upper and lower brackets and the last day is the finals, again broken into upper and lower brackets
- in rounds 1 and 2, you get 4 runs each day, with a run giving you 5 races. in round 1, you have to win at least three races in a run two qualify for the upper bracket (class A). simply running or entering late during round 2 qualifies for the lower bracket (class B). in round 2, one win in class A qualifies you for class B finals and 3 wins gets you into class A finals. I don’t remember what wins you need in round 2 class B but I think you can still get into class A finals, it’s been a while since I looked
- you have to lock in your team of horses before each run (the game used to matchmake each individual race but now they matchmake all 5 races at the start of a run) and you get a 12-hour window to lock in your finals team before having to wait another 12 hours to see your finals race
- you get sweet, beautiful gacha currency, scaling on the amount of wins you get in a run and everyone in the finals gets currency and pulls, scaling up on your position
rinse and repeat every month
4 Likes
is there any chance the horse girls will start doing biathlon?
hello
hi
happy day fools
(the joke is they’re all wearing hats)
(okay I guess the actual joke is that there’s enough horses wearing hats that they could create a hat-wearing horse girl idol unit)
(this isn’t about the joke but I just want to point out that “Cheval Grand” literally means “big horse”)
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hi
hello
buckle up, this is going to be a long shitpost
I mean, they’re all long
but this one contains two months worth of shitpost, so let’s try to race through it
because it’s horse racing
Pisces Cup
the Pisces cup is interesting solely for the reason that it’s the first cup of year 3, meaning the hot new balance adjustments are now in play. some horses got buffs on their unique skills, building for power is now a hilariously stupid and viable thing you can do and the various horses they’ve been putting into the gamblinggacha pool finally get a chance to shine after the odd one-two of a sprint cup and a dirt cup. this cup would be the most standard setup possible, a 2000m race at Nakayama on a sunny day
through the power of trying the most headass shit I can possibly think of, we have the team
Meisho Dotou
(I am not willing to sit down and argue how this should be romanized, please have the conversation amongst yourselves)
Dotou is a shy, clumsy horse with just, the biggest chest and also maybe a cleft lip. she’s also a foil/sidekick of Machikanefukukitaru (no I won’t argue this romanization either because then we have to talk about Machikane Tannhauser), the fortune telling horse who happily reminds you that stats are good, but so are fortunes
Dotou is built as an experiment in the new mechanic with power, where having 1200+ power makes your horse do power surge going into the third split, essentially acting as an acceleration skill that can then combine with actual acceleration and speed boost skills, with the caveat that the random motivation modifier that is active in the lower rounds can lower your final number under 1200, thus giving you times where your carefully built horse don’t
the new power surge mechanic combines with Dotou’s kit, which has a light focus on mid-length races and a heavy focus on overtaking on the last corner from the chase position, to make a horse that sometimes works but generally contests well going in
also her unique is called “I Never Goof Up” and that is funny
Nakayama Festa
okay motherfuckers
do you love gambling
I mean, really love gambling
Festa is a horse where three of marque skills in her kit more or less is the game asking how lucky you’re feeling. she has a gold passive that gives her a boost to her speed, power and guts that has a random chance to activate with said chance being increased if she’s not the favorite, a skill that can either give her a huge boost during the middle of the race or tire her out, and her unique, a speed boost that scales on her being unpopular.
I love gambling
so I set out train a Festa with kind of a flat stat line to save budget there and then put more of it in skills and
okay in the process of this plan, it turns out I made her too good and now she was the favored horse in 90% of the races she was in and usually the most popular horse in any given race too
but sometimes she functioned and the wins were hilarious. but most of the time it was her falling off the girder in between two buildings
Mister CB
(okay yes this is unambiguously a masculine name but let’s not dwell too hard on this)
Mister CB was the 2nd Anniversary rate-up banner horse (which everyone was pulling on anyway because we got a ton of free pulls and also Twin Turbo) and it seems like she was tailor designed for this cup: a strong all-around kit and being the rear-most tactic, a good set of cards that can support her (the tactic with the least horses somehow has more cards than horses in the game but that just means these horses can get dumb). most important is her having access to 月影一閃, the gold acceleration skill for the final straightaway, which means she also has access to the evolved version
except that because of the layout of the track, it goes off a bit late for her to contest sometimes because it might not fire off until getting around the final corner. it blunts her effectiveness somewhat but she performs pretty solidly
she has a hat. hats are good!
due to technical stupidity, the footage for this final does not have its original audio. however, I feel as though I have found a suitable replacement.
okay, moving on
Aries Cup
so it’s come to this
in the new era of open league where the rank limit is A+ that started last year, the 2023 Aries Cup is the second long track after 22 Sagittarius Cup and the first to be, well, actually long: 3200m, the longest G1 currently in the game. this means stamina is no longer a dump stat, we actually need it, and other idiot ideas somehow work. and I have plenty of idiot ideas because long tracks are my kryptonite
Mejiro Palmer
oh god, I’m so happy about this
I finally get to talk about Palmer and all the nonsense she brings
Palmer is one of the handful of outrun horses in the game who has access to Big Escape
now, you, normal person reading this thread, are looking at this and going “I don’t know what this does”
so, outrun horses, the thing they do is they run out in front and try to outrun the entire pack for the entire race. as you probably assume, this is very all or nothing. an outrun horse with this passive will go out even further in front, seemingly trying to outrun God himself, expending a bunch of stamina in the process, thus giving us ultimate outrunning
“okay but how does this translate in the actual game”
if Palmer functions correctly, she will effectively shut down the jockeying potential of any non-Big Escape outrun horse. of course, even with her big heals, she will die in the process, but somehow I built her with so much stamina that she wins sometimes by virtue of outlasting the entire race out of spite (or the even more cursed and hilarious occurrence of falling behind in the last corner and then coming back because everyone else has been shot with horse magic)
I’m going to level with you, I made this horse by accident. she was trained for the previous cup and somehow my small brained idea of trying to counter Big Escape’s stamina drain with Too Much Stamina combined with building length-agnostic skills actually meant I built a good horse for the exact circumstances of this cup. and then she even wins!
winning is a bonus though, her real job is keeping first place nice and clean for the Actual Good Horse on the team
Rice Shower
I really wish this was default Rice so I could spend a bunch of text talking about how she goes on the track with a knife. instead, the Rice I have here is Make Up Vampire! Rice (that’s actually the name, even the exclamation mark), who gets a big heal as her unique skill instead of a late speed boost for contesting in the final spurt and also recently got buffed as part of balance changes.
not that I was purposefully trying to take advantage of this. much like Palmer, Rice was actually trained for December’s cup and somehow I accidentally hit the exact combination of skills and stats to make Rice extremely rude and disrespectful to everyone on track, often manifesting in her catching up and overtaking Palmer (usually in first) before the last split of the track (roughly the last 1100m). this is demonstrated by her 36% win rate, which is kind of absurd when you consider you run 3 horses on a team so in theory, the goal is for all three to have a 33% win rate, thus mathematically ensuring that you just don’t lose, it’s just that easy and that also there’s no actual guarantee that your horse will do good, nevermind all the motivation fuckery
anywho, between her unique, Drain for rose and good friend meta skill 円弧のマエストロ, she has a ton of healing and having 鍔迫り合い, the chase tactic gold skill for accelerating into the last part of the race, she slingshots past everyone in front of her and stays there, often getting wins with gaps of 4-10 lengths
I did this shit by accident. probably because I am an idiot.
Super Creek
I’m sorry, let me stop shitposting about Creek for a minute
Creek is the value/meta long race champion because she is saddled with heals, is easily accessible as a 2-star horse and is easy to build with her good default kit and stamina bonus. the main caveat here is that she needs to be contesting in the front of the pack for her unique, a big, huge heal, to go off, meaning if she’s inert and doesn’t contest for at least fourth, she’ll fade away by the end if, for some reason, you were stupid and only built her with one heal. not that I would do that. that’s dumb.
okay I did that.
if she manages to get into position and work correctly, she just casually outpaces every horse on the track and glides into the finish line effortlessly. otherwise she is moral support (ignore that her winrate is higher than Palmer’s, Palmer has a job)
okay, look, the whole “mommy” thing isn’t me, it’s all Lord Cygames
the funny thing is it could be worse, her original design features her in a virgin killer sweater and having just
the absolutely biggest badonkers
exceedingly large tracts of land
massive fucking milkers
(it’s where she stores the stamina)
I’m glad Lord Cygames showed some restraint
now let’s not talk about Halloween Creek, who somehow stays under wraps despite not having enough bandage to support her
hey this here Aires cup went way better than the Pisces cup. excluding a run with a B-team and trying to figure out if Creek or Symboli Kris S (she is the gun horse above. she summons a gun. her stand is a gun. she’s American, so she speaks some English. she is very serious about barbecue. 
) would be the third, I was usually hitting 4 wins a run (a run has 5 races).
did I finally figure out my mortal enemy, the long race, by accident?
the final seemed uneventful, except one trainer had both a Mister CB and a New Years Satono Diamond on their team. these two are Danger Horses: they spend most of the race in the back, not using up a lot of stamina and have absolutely explosive drive potential for the end. Dia also has スタミナグリード in her kit, the gold long length nuke, which also means she has the evolved version of it
the race otherwise goes as I would expect it: Palmer owns first, Rice is rude and Creek is there. in fact, Creek is so there that she forgets to heal during the entire race. good job.
going into the final corner, Palmer is still holding, but Rice has activated maximum rudeness and the Danger Horses are being dangerous.
thanks for nothing, Creek
oh boy, I’ve been waiting ages to bust this out:
Rice Shower is the only horse in the anime to get a villain shot during the opening
so this is it. the end of monthly horse racing. starting with this cup, cups are now semi-monthly, so we won’t be seeing another long horse girl phone app thread shitpost in this vein until June.
instead, Lord Cygames is teasing a different monthly PVP event starting in May and alternating with cups.
join me next month as I figure out what the hell the League of Heroes is
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