With Season 5 of Diamond Dynasty right around the corner, it seemed like a good time to really reflect on the Sets and Seasons model introduced in MLB The Show 23. Revamping and reshaping Diamond Dynasty, Sets and Seasons introduced a rotation system similar to competitive card games like Magic: The Gathering. At any given time, only a couple select Sets would be Ranked legal which meant players would need to rebuild their teams with each rotation. This is an idea that I absolutely loved when it was announced, as it’s something I’ve said in the past I’d love to see implemented.

The big question – how would content be handled in this new system? Beyond that, how would it affect the meta, team builds and longevity of Diamond Dynasty in MLB The Show 23?

Let’s talk about it.

Were Sets and Seasons A Good Idea?

What Are Sets and Seasons

Sets and Seasons is a rotation format introduced in Diamond Dynasty this year. In previous years, every single card released during the content cycle could be used at will. There were no restrictions, meaning your Ranked squads could feature the exact same cards all year if you desired. With Sets and Seasons, each Season only allowed the two most recent Sets and the Core set in your Ranked squads. This format also extended to offline where many Conquest maps throughout the year required a Season eligible squad.

Season 6 was established as the Season that all cards would become legal, with upcoming Season 5 cards essentially being “Core” cards as they will never be restricted from play.

Forever-99

A major selling point during the pre-release hype of MLB The Show 23 was the availability of 99 overall cards on Day One. We’ve had 99 overalls available on launch before, but they’ve exclusively been Live Series collection rewards or part of other special collections. Previously, the Innings Program format paid out a Boss Choice Pack each Inning allowing players to choose one of several Bosses. It typically took a couple months for those Boss packs to feature 99 overalls, meaning the Bosses available at launch were low-to-mid 90’s in terms of overall.

That also changed this year as the XP Reward Path returned as the “main” feature in each Season and showcased 99 overall Bosses from the beginning. Not only did we get 99 overall Bosses alongside the usual Live Series collection, but SDS also changed up the big Legends and Flashbacks collections we were used to getting as the year went along.

Instead of building up to these collections, these Set collections were available from day one of each new Season and featured a Choice Pack of three top-tier cards. You couldn’t collect these immediately as they required a fair amount of cards from the Set, but it was still an injection of 99 overalls to your binder.

Launch content also saw a Premium pack, the Around the World 1 pack, drop some big 99 overalls into our laps before we even played a single game this year. That pack, by the way, featured a 99 overall Mike Trout available day one. Chase Packs returned this year and Chase Pack 1, also available day one, featured WBC MVP Shohei Ohtani in true two-way glory.

That’s a lot of excitement to generate for a game launch and I feel like hopes were high. This was a massive amount of content available from the beginning and a beautiful change of pace. Ultimately, the success of this model was going to be based on the content released after the initial hype died down.

Quantity V. Quality

As with the Boss packs we discussed from prior games, the Headliner packs we became so used to also featured a “power creep.” That simply means that new cards slowly increased in power level and overall, culminating in a late-summer barrage of the “endgame” 99 overalls that players would roster for the rest of the year.

I’d like to take a sidebar here and say that I actually disliked that content rhythm. I’ve always found it a bit boring that we restart every single year, with low-level cards slowly becoming a bit better and then slowly getting a little better before every card turned into a 99 overall. From my experience in the Diamond Dynasty community, I feel I’m in a minority with that feeling as many people enjoy that process. To each their own, of course, but the complete removal of this arduous process was exciting to me. However, success ultimately relied on how SDS chose to release cards all year.

Those Headliner packs turned into Diamond Duos packs this year, where we got forty different sets released during the year. That’s a total of eighty 99 overall cards that were injected into the game by way of twice weekly pack content. Unfortunately, this is an area that ended up falling quite a bit short as so many of these Diamond Duos cards were sub-par to average – at best. We definitely got some fun cards from these packs (like Kaiju Bryce Harper) but for the most part, these packs were simply fodder. Is it really that big of a deal that you’re releasing 99 overalls every week when they aren’t that good?

O Captain! My Captain!

Captains were also introduced this year and deserve an article dedicated solely to them. Mentioning Captains here is relevant to me because so many of those “dud” Diamond Duos cards were perfect for Captain builds. The problem, however, is that Captains were fumbled pretty much from the beginning and became more of a gimmick than a real application. This all ties into the Sets and Seasons discussion as rotation hit all cards except Core cards. So no matter how good a Captain may or may not have been, it would rotate out in a couple months. No matter the quantity of cards that could be added to a Captain theme team, they would all rotate out in a couple months.

I truly believe this was a big disconnect between Captains and Sets and Seasons overall. The Live Series team collections used to be exciting collections to chase, yet the collection cards this year only powered up Live Series cards. That might sound great in principal, but the execution was way off the mark as no one really wanted to take a Detroit Tigers theme build into Ranked when they could field an entire team of 99 overalls. Team Affinity returned to deserved fanfare, but the Captains would rotate in a couple months. This is a major problem as it just doesn’t promote usage of these Captained theme teams.

Sure, there’s a team full of 99 overall cards I can slap onto my favorite team’s Captain build. But what happens when those cards rotate? The new Captains have different abilities, there are completely different cards that are even legal and the team just doesn’t end up looking the way I want it to. I would have loved to use a Braves theme team all year, but when the cards I want to use most rotate – why would I even bother? I feel like SDS might suggest using different team builds and that’s a perfectly fair statement. Diamond Dynasty is supposed to be about player choice, though. Instead of being able to run out an ever-evolving, always improving version of a Braves theme team – I was either patching holes in the lineup or using something else entirely.

I don’t think Captains were executed as well as they could have been and I’m actually quite confident that SDS will improve them next year. I think one major missing component was a playlist dedicated solely to Captain builds that didn’t feature rotating cards. If we’re going into the CCG-style rotation format, surely we can also introduce a “Legacy” style format where all cards are legal. As more and more cards get released, it only makes the theme teams stronger and could feature some really cool team-specific rewards as well. No matter what SDS may or may not do with Captains in the future, if we don’t eventually get a Captain specific playlist to promote year-round theme teams – I feel like we’re missing the mark.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

Another hard-to-deny fact about Sets and Seasons this year is we got unnecessary repeats of players. In theory, I understand why we’d get repeat 99 overalls of certain players. Everyone wants to have a 99 overall Mike Trout available all the time, right? Name a popular player and of course we want usable versions. The deluge of 99 overalls also tarnished the “quality” of some lower-rated cards. We saw 97 overall cards basically become a meme this year, as SDS wildly reduced Event rewards to 97 overall for most of the year. Even if we saw some 95 overall, or 97 overall or 98 overall cards that were good; the vast amount of 99 overalls available just overshadowed them.

We got a 99 overall Retro Home Run Derby Kyle Schwarber when a Kaiju 99 overall version was already legal. Even if that Retro HRD was released at a time close to when the Set 2 version would rotate, it was still a second 99 overall of the same guy. The other side to this is that the Kaiju version was a Phillies card and the HRD version was a Cubs card. That meant both the Cubs and Phillies could feature their respective card on a theme team. Ok – but it was still a second version of a dude that already had a similar card. There’s so many Legends that could have gotten cards over current-day players that got repeat cards. I’m glad we got really good versions of current-day players, I just feel like this was an obvious area that SDS whiffed on balance. As I write this, the Championship Series Program is launching which features a 99 overall Aaron Nola, 99 overall J.T. Realmuto and another 99 overall Kyle Schwarber. It’s almost November so at this point it just feels like overkill.

To a degree, some repeats can’t be avoided with content based off actual performances throughout the year. Nor am I suggesting that SDS nerf cards just so they aren’t repeat 99’s. Maybe the best solution is some type of “chemistry” option that allows cards to fit on theme teams as long as that player played for that team. Perhaps Captains should be the team-specific versions of a player that theme teams are built around. It would have at least been a bit more interesting if that Phillies version of Schwarber was a Captain and any player that ever played for the Phillies could get boosts from it. Instead, we just got two almost identical versions of the same guy before a third was released a couple months later.

The Closer

After all is said and done – were Sets and Seasons a good idea?

I think so.

I enjoy the theory behind the rotation, I just don’t think it was executed perfectly in MLB The Show 23. I’ve seen many call for the format to die alongside ’23 as it commences the death march toward February and the next game cycle. Even though I don’t agree with that perspective, I certainly understand why people feel the way they do. Content simply fell flat as the year went on and that new season “launch night” excitement became a mere whimper. To me, there’s so much potential with this content format that I’d like to see it return in MLB The Show 24 as long as SDS takes the measured steps to improve it.

Give us “eternal” style playlists so we can use Captains all year, without fear of the best cards rotating from our theme teams. Increase the variety of guys actually getting 99 overall cards and make the releases impactful, lessening the eyerolls if we see a second or third version of someone. I also still think that each program’s main reward should be a Captain, boosting all the cards from the same program. It would basically amount to a “starter deck” and make those program rewards all the more valuable. I’d probably be rocking a Great Race of ’98 theme team if Mark McGwire was a Captain that boosted all the other cards from that set.

The possibilities are endless. It’s just going to take some recalibration from SDS next year to change the narrative.

What are your thoughts on Sets and Seasons? Do you want to see it return next year or should SDS go back to the previous content style? Let us know in the comments!