Don't be afraid to chase the stars. Through enough effort and dedication, any Uma is viable.

Teio was my first 3 star in Umamusume, so it could be said that she chose me to be her trainer. And after watching the Season 2 of the anime and learning more about her history and feats, I fell in love with her and she became my one and only oshi.

For the first few months of playing I was mostly stumbling around, playing more casually and just bringing her into CMs with whatever i managed to put together. Through sheer luck I managed to win the first CM, Taurus Cup on Tokyo 2400m, also recognized as Japanese Derby. It was cool and I was happy, but I didn't think too much of it.

Enter, Charles from Victoria Frontier. One day a video landed in my feed that changed everything. Charles' Triple Tiara Win on Vivlos. After seeing his reaction and some follow up commentary I felt inspired. This is where the idea of a Triple Crown/Tiara first entered my mind and the idea of Oshi vs. Meta. And I started to wonder.

Can I do that too?

Teio is by no means a strong uma kit wise. She has no useful innate skills and her unique while strong is very unreliable. I had the Anime Teio too, which is slightly better. But I already had the First Crown earned by OG Teio so i felt like i had to continue the trend even if she had a worse kit. No crutches, no excuses. It would be hard, but it felt right. I was committed.

Here I want to mention that I did not have good cards at this point in the game. I had to do full 200 pulls to get Anime Teio banner which ran along side Kitasan Black, which meant I was nowhere close to having MLB Kitasan. In fact i did not have any good cards, no Creeks, Fine Motions, Bikos or SSR Riko at usable level. So I just had to rely on SR and welfare cards going into the next big milestone.

CM 6 - Libra Cup - Kikuka Sho

You probably heard about it given there are a million memes of it, real life Tokai Teio suffered an injury after Japanese Derby and was unable to participate in Kikuka Sho and compete for his real life Triple Crown. It was heartbreaking news and pretty hard to watch in the anime. It felt so unfair. They were robbed from even a chance at earning what they, imo, deserved. I intended to right that wrong and bring Teio that G1 win. But it would be tough. And thanks to the power of hindsight we also know that Kikuka Sho track has never rerun again after this CM, so it was now or never.

End Closers are obviously pretty strong here, but Teio was not built to be one. In fact she has E in End, but not going End felt like a huge disadvantage so I decided to try to force it. Two recoveries were needed this CM and I lacked a second one besides Swinging Maestro. Superior Heal felt like the only good option for End Closers not named Gold Ship or Narita Taishin so I was forced to borrow Fantasy Grass as I did not have her. That came with it's own problems though. There were no Grasses that had both Straightaway Spurt and Uma Stan sparks, which were essential skills that also happened to have end closer sparks, so I ended up only reaching End C with my own parent.

The deck I used was pretty poor
Speed: Narita Brian, Sweep Tosho
Power: Rice Shower 1LB, Biwa Hayahide, Hishi Amazon
Pal: MLB SSR Riko (borrow)

Given that the the track required both a ton of stamina due to lenght and power due to uphills, I opted for a triple power cards with stamina bonus, instead of taking a mix of stamina and power cards.

Ended up with a Winrate of 58.7% as a Solo Ace with 2 debuffers.

Won finals with one of the greatest comebacks ever. Teio entered late race in 9th. Failed wit check on Straightaway Spurt. All felt lost, but miraculously she managed to proc No Stopping Me off my own debuffer Air Grove running in Pace and ran past everyone into 1st place finish.

Second Crown Obtained and it felt so good. I righted the wrong. I made Teio win a CM she had no business winning and gave her the Crown she was robbed of. I thought the biggest hurdle was past me, but little did i know, the worse was still to come...

The calm before the storm

As the last leg of the Triple Crown was on Cm12, it was still quite a bit away.

In the meantime, many months of patience and careful consideration have finally started to pay off as we arrived at several support card banners that would be pivotal to my success in the final leg of the Triple Crown.

Firstly, I was finally able to MLB Kitasan Black on her rerun, which helped me round up my deck for CM8 the Arime Kinen, which went less than ideal (37.5% winrate), but Teio managed to miraculously clutch out a victory in The finals just like in the real Arima Kinen.

By the Start of Trackblazer through the use of almost all of my carat reserves, selector tickets and rainbow crystals I managed to get MLB Nice Nature, MLB Fukukitaru, MLB Fine Motion, MLB SR Ayabe Guts and 3LB Narita Top Road. I short, i got very lucky.

I have felt the strongest I have ever been in this game. I had all the meta cards at my disposal going into Trackblazer. I thought that getting the final Crown would be a breeze. But, around this time it had finally dawned on me, just how wrong I was.

CM12 - Aries Cup - Satsuki Sho

^("The land of Christmas Oguri")

Christmas Oguri Cap is the Thanos of this CM. She has the single strongest and extremly reliable skill on this track built right into her own unique and the inherited version doesn't work so it's solely for her to use. I honestly started panicking a little after coming to this realization, but i didn't want it to discourage me, so brushed it off for now and followed the plan i had laid out.

Initially my plan was to run Teio as a Late Surger taking advantage of the good activation window for Ryan and Dober's uniques and also take advantage of an additional acceleration from the Sirius Symboli card that was coming out. I also wanted to do a guts build as I thought the additional speed from guts would help me close the gap more easily.

However, that didn't come to fruition. Stat lines were too hard to hit with a guts deck, but the bigger problem were Teio aptitudes. As Trackblazer heavily favors umas that can run both Miles and Mediums, having good aptitudes for them is important. Teio has Mile E which requires 4 spark slots to bring to A. She also has Late C, which requires 2 spark slots to bring to A. That leaves no room for Medium sparks. Even if i compromised my Mile to B, 1 spark was not reliable enough to get Medium S. Late surger also proved to be quite unreliable in testing, often failing to catch up to strong Oguris even after proccing multiple gambling accelerations.

I had no choice but to abandon both ideas and start parent making from scratch mid-way through my prep, less than 2 weeks before start of the CM.

I went back to the roots and chose to run her in Pace with a more traditional Speed/Power/Wit deck. While Paces very much lacked acceleration options they were not completely put of them. Head on is very unreliable, but there a saving grace, No Stopping Me (NSM) from Yukino Bijin Wit.

Deck I settled on was:
Speed: 3LB Narita Top Road, Fukukitaru
Power: El Condor Pasa (borrow)
Wit: Fine Motion, Nice Nature, 0LB Yukino Bijin

For Parents I went very ambitious. I wanted to inherit as many late race speed skills as possible to help me catch up. As such my parents and grandparents were a mix of unique inherits all focusing on boosting me late race: Shadow Break, Barcarole of Blessing, Duty of Dignity Calls, Angling and scheming in case I overtake fronts.

With parents out of the way, all that was left to do was throw as many runs as I possibly could to make the best Teio I can, which would be quite hard as I have a full time job to balance with. There were no "good enough"s. I needed to create an absolute monster in order to challenge the most demonic of Christmas Oguris.

Throughout the next week or so I came up with some good candidates but none were really ideal, and in testing they were still very often left behind. I learned that in order to have a chance, positioning was crucial going into late race. I needed a lot of mid game skills, max speed and near max power to keep up and overtake in late race, and all the wit i could muster in order to not fall behind in pace as hitting NSM was my main win con.

Basically my stat goals were triple 1200s and enough Stamina and Guts to survive, while also getting Medium S, and hitting all of the skills I needed from my cards, Rival hints and inspirations. I quickly realized just how tall the bar I had to hit was, and through more testing in practice rooms, it settled in more and more that the bar could not go down. It was non negotiable.

I was doubting whether I would be able to do it. The more practice room I went through the more I was losing hope. I was even ready to throw in the towel and give up.

But then I thought to myself "How could I just give up and lose without even giving it my all?", If I just give up, then how can i look myself in the mirror and call myself an Oshi Trainer of Teio, a literally embodiment of not giving up despite adversity. Teio's story sounds like something taken straight out of an anime, but it is not fiction, it really happened. And it had been my inspiration and the reason i kept going.

So, with one week remaining, I decided to go all in or nothing. I used my selector ticket on Yukino Bijin to bring her to 1LB to improve my wit output and I also used a Rainbow Crystal to MLB NTR. You can call me crazy for doing this, and maybe I am, but I needed to squeeze out every last drop of stats i could. I grinded as much as i could, staying up very late into the night to do the 4-5 runs a day, which as you know take a while in Trackblazer.

The end result... was unsatisfying. I was printing SS and SS+ rank Teios left and right and got some good candidates, but nothing that was truly amazing, that I would be satisfied with. But the time has come, the Round 1 was starting so i had to take what i had.

CM12 Starts

First day went not too bad. I managed to win 11/20 matches and qualify to Group A in round 2. Oguris were indeed very strong, and I lost many races even to not too well built ones just due to their unique skill being so strong. Looking through discords I have also found a few more fellow Teio players, that actually committed into building her as a Late Surger and seeing quite a bit of success. Seeing that I wanted to give it another shot, and actualyl manage to luck out and make a somewhat strong Late Surger Teio with just a few tries.

On Day 2, given that I already made it to Group A I decided to give the new Late Surger Teio a shot. At first I thought I struck gold. I went 5/5 in the first set. However i quickly got a reality check, that that was just a fluke and i got lucky, as I went on to go 4/15 in the next 3 sets. That kind of killed my confidence in this build.

Day 3 - 6/20. It looked quite grim, I went 2/2/2/0, which also meant I did not qualify for A Finals, yet. It looked like I might fail at the final hurdle and not even make it to Finals to have a shot at a win. B finals wasn't an option, it had to be A.

Throughout the duration of the CM I was of course still grinding runs in hopes of makeing a stronger Teio. And after day 3 it was clear that it wouldn't just be nice to hit something better. I NEEDED something better.

And it finally happened. In the evening of Day 3 the stars finally aligned. Fast Learner run, that got Medium S, all the skills I wanted and a strong stat line to boot. It was a bit lower on power than I wanted but it was still better than anything I've made the past several weeks for grinding. I finally saw the fruits of my labor after dedicating myself so hard to this. But it was still to soon to celebrate, the final test was still ahead.

On Day 4, I got to test the fruits of my labor and... I went 13/20 and Qualified for A Finals. Not bad at all, seeing that it's my highest winrate in a day yet, and Round 2 is harder than Round 1. I managed to beat some extremely strong opponents, that my previous ace would not even be able to touch. Of course I could not win them all, given how strong and consistent Christmas Oguri is, but this day gave me real hope that we can go all the way and complete the Triple Crown.

The Day of the Finals

The day of the finals came. I was beyond anxious. The stakes were never higher. Months of account preparation and over a month of parent and ace preparation all lead up to this one race. To add some context, I came off 2 consecutive 3rd place finished in the previous 2 CMs due to some extremely bad luck in Finals. So that was all i could think about, that despite all that effort, something would go wrong.

Would I really be able to topple the titans and claim victory?

I took a deep breath and clicked the Race Button.

There were 2 Christmas Oguris in my lobby. One of them was kind of weak, but the other one looked really strong. Thankfully neither of them had any dominators and both went triple ace with a mix of Lates Pace and Front. It looked, doable.

In early race Teio ended up at the very back of the Pace chaser pack, not a good position. And it stayed mostly like that throughout the mid race. Thankfully she was able to keep up with the pack and not be left behind. However, what was ahead was quite scary. The stronger Oguri was getting pretty far ahead to the point where she even overtook the Front Runner. She than activated her Unique and shot off into the distance. But it wasn't lost yet, as Teio was in a good position to proc NSM off the other pace chasers and began her chace after the Oguri. The Oguri was already far ahead though so I wasn't sure If i would be able to catch her. The amount of late game speed skill though came through as they allowed me to close the gap enough to proc Teio's Unique, which was huge. As a reminder that skill is extremely inconsistent, so I almost jumped out of my chair when i saw it proc. And it was just enough to close the gap fully and barely over take the Oguri and win by 3/4 lengths..

The amount of relief I felt in that moment was unreal. All the time and effort, all those sleepless night all spent grinding and planning, and all the resources I committed into this have finally paid off.

It was done. My Teio is now officially a Triple Crown Uma in Champtions Meetings. And with that I have completed everything I set out to achieve in this game. Nothing will topple this achievement for me.

If you somehow got to the end of this, I guess thanks for reading all of my rambling. I could not sleep after winning CM6 and I again could not sleep after winning this one, so I just wanted to document my journey and my thoughts and feeling somewhere.