MLB The Show 24: Season 4 Launch Breakdown

Ho, boy. Christmas is just a few weeks away, it’s snowing for the first time this year and the final season of Diamond Dynasty has arrived. It’s been a long, winding year within MLB The Show 24 but we’ve reached the end — and SDS is going out with a bang.

Show Show Update

Be sure to grab your annual Turkey Pack in the Show Shop. This pack features 2024 Finest Ryan McMahon as well as a turkey-flavored icon, banner and bat skin. It’s free!

All previous Chase cards have been added to Chase Packs, meaning you have a chance of pulling the rarest cards in the game.

There’s also a Headliners 3-pack at a discounted rate. Keep in mind, however, these are regular Headliner packs and not the guaranteed Headliner packs we see on occasion.

Finally, the Season 4 Vault Pack is a guaranteed source of Diamonds from each season. While this was a premium lottery ticket all year, offering a potentially massive discount to rare cards, it could pay out Golds and other worthless cards that made the 40,000 Stub investment questionable. Now, these provide immense value to those that haven’t completed collections. Not only can you pull cards easier, the market value will plummet and allow pretty much everyone to complete collections much easier.

Speaking of Packs

In addition to the Show Shop update, there were some other notable updates as well.

Twitch Drops are currently active so do your thing there to earn some free packs.

Don’t forget about the free packs hitting your inventory for the season reset. You get the Cornerstone Captain Choice Pack, the Season Starter Pack that comes with five standard Show packs and a Season 4 Vault pack. Finally, you get two of the brand-new Now & Later packs. These are the packs that give you a voucher to redeem a pack in MLB The Show 25 after it releases.

Let’s talk about the Season 4 Cornerstone Pack. The first three seasons saw a selection of Cornerstone Captains that every player could choose a single Captain from. This season, the Cornerstone Captain pack features all previous Cornerstone Captains which means you now have access to every single one. Not only that, but the Captains have been upgraded to 99 overall versions with incredibly powerful Captain boosts.

In addition to Cornerstone Captains getting a massive upgrade, the previously under-released Pitcher and Hitter Captain Choice Packs have been upgraded to pay out all previous team captains. This is a huge deal, as despite SDS announcing at the beginning of the year that each franchise would get only two team captains, they inexplicably provided very few opportunities for players to acquire these. It was a huge letdown when cool content would come out that required specific team grinding, only to realize you couldn’t do a fully powered theme team because you didn’t take that particular Captain. An important note is that any unopened single-team packs will still only pay out one. The upgrade appears to be any future iterations of that pack. Of course, SDS is making very easy to acquire all the Captains between a pack in your inventory and packs in the XP Reward Path for Season 4.

Oh yeah, these Captains were also upgraded to 99 overall Captains.

That means that SDS brought to life something that we mused about and never expected to see. This is truly a great gesture from SDS and a beautiful example of harmony between a fanbase and a developer. Upgrading all previously available Captains to “endgame” power makes all theme team combinations that much more fun to build. This is the kind of innovation and “do the fun stuff” attitude I love to see.

Season 4 XP Reward Path

I’ll bullet-point what I consider the most relevant details for this new path:

• Double-XP Forever, meaning you’ll earn rewards at a lightning pace.
• A total of 10 Now & Then vouchers, granting you at least 10 packs in next year’s game.
• All previous Hitter and Pitcher Captains. You’ll finally be able to build a full theme team with these upgraded Captains.
• All previous XP Reward Path reward cards. This means the cards you earned along the path in addition to the Boss packs.
• All previous XP Reward Path bosses. Yes, you get all previous bosses as well. The packs pay out a copy of every single card, meaning you’re going to acquire duplicates of 99-overall cards. These will be incredibly useful for exchanges.
• The usual mix of Ballin’ Is A Habit packs, Stubs and one free Extreme Choice Pack.
• The Reward Path also features the following cards: Finest Tanner Scott, Finest Zack Wheeler, Milestone Nolan Arenado, Retro Finest Kenley Jansen, Finest Jose Ramirez and Finest Bobby Witt Jr.

There’s no Boss pack with choices so you get all of these cards for completing the program. The program cap is a rather paltry 350,000 XP that most players will eclipse pretty quickly with permanent Double XP. That means you’ll have infinite wheel spins the more you play, which will pay out infinite packs and essentially generate infinite Stubs for as long as you choose to do it. You can now collect every card in the game considerably easier than before, as Flashback packs for the main online modes will make even the rarest cards show up on the marketplace eventually.

The Closer

As the content cycle for MLB The Show 24 enters its twilight, SDS managed to make this year’s game a fully realized version of what Sets and Seasons could have been the entire time.

With Captains being boosted to keep them viable with all the top-end cards, theme teams get the ultimate dynamic it was missing all year. Not having access to great cards that represent a team due to rotation always kept the team building from being as exciting as it could be. SDS did a noble job pivoting after a disastrous Season 1, yet Captains and theme teams always felt out of step with the vision. The restricted card sets was the biggest reason, amplified by the lack of a Salary Cap mode or Captain mode that could have extended life of rotated cards. In the last couple days, SDS mentioned that Season 4 will give us a glimpse at what Diamond Dynasty will look like in MLB The Show 25. We’ll need to see what that actually means, as for now it serves as nothing but vague semi-hype.

However, if it means that we can expect dope cards released regularly, premium pack cards being pullable in standard Show packs all year (reports are rolling in that previous premium cards are being pulled in standard Show packs), Captains remaining relevant all year and shorter XP Paths for rewards — then that’s a terrific sign for next year.

There will be plenty of commentary and analysis on this year’s game to come, as well as the fun speculation for next year as 2025 blooms. For now, I’d like to thank SDS for a Hell of an effort this year and regaining trust from the community in spades with the radical pivot that saved this year’s game. By the end of the year, I was having the time of my life bullshitting with buddies in Ranked Co-Op, not caring about inner-mechanics of the game as often as normal.

I just got to chill and enjoy some baseball with the bros. That wouldn’t be possible without the folks at SDS that undoubtedly bust their asses to create this thing we love so much that we can’t help but criticize it — but always with the love. There’s a specific day coming up soon that revolves around gratitude so I’ll close with this:

Thank you SDS for all that you do and thank you to everyone that read the content throughout the year. This is a fun, goofy, nerdy-ass little niche we have with ourselves here. But we share it together, no matter our viewpoint or opinions on any of it. My challenge to myself as we roll into a new year and to you as well – focus on sharing and receiving a bit more love. Everything seems a lot cooler when you’re appreciating the good more than you’re noticing the could-be-betters.