Today is one of those juicy content days where we get an entirely new card series that has stuff all over the place. Offline players get a ton of content to grind, online players get a new Event; and a new card series means new packs and collection rewards.
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Program Breakdown
The player item rewards featured in this program are:
- Matt Carpenter, 3B STL (94 OVR)
- Lou Gehrig, 1B NYY (93 OVR)
- Michael Conforto, LF NYM (93 OVR)
- Robbie Ray, SP TOR (92 OVR)
- Luis Arraez, 2B MIN (92 OVR)
Clicking on a player item in the program reward path above takes you directly to that card's unique ShowZone database page.
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Conquest Map Hidden Rewards Locations
Unlock exclusive player item reward 93 OVR Vintage Nolan Arenado (Colorado Rockies) by completing thing Conquest map.
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Diamond Quest Breakdown
Unlock exclusive player item rewards 93 OVR Vintage Fred McGriff (Atlanta Braves) and 93 OVR Vintage Luis Castillo (Cincinnati Reds) by completing this Diamond Quest map and rolling them as Epic rewards; and/or purchasing them on the marketplace.
Click the player rewards to see each respective card's full database profile.
Click here for a full guide on how to play Diamond Quest and earn the maximum rewards in every run, and how to make infinite Stubs by grinding Diamond Quest maps.
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Mini Seasons Breakdown
Unlock the following players in this Mini Seasons challenge:
- Mitch Garver, C MIN (93 OVR)
- Ryan McMahon, 3B COL (92 OVR)
- Raul Ibanez, LF SEA (92 OVR)
- Matt Strahm, RP PHI (92 OVR)
Click the player rewards to see each respective card's full database profile.
MLB The Show 26 Old School Event Program Breakdown
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Pack and Collection Breakdown
The Deluxe Pack guarantees 1 Diamond player card. The Premier Pack guarantees 3 Diamond player cards. The Ultra Pack guarantees 4 Diamond 92+ OVR & 1 Diamond 93+ OVR player cards from the following Vintage Series player cards:
- Gary Sanchez, C NYY (94 OVR)
- Garrett Crochet, SP BOS (94 OVR)
- Chase Utley, 2B PHI (94 OVR)
- Larry Walker, RF COL (94 OVR)
- Teoscar Hernandez, RF TOR (93 OVR)
- Aaron Bummer, RP CWS (93 OVR)
- Xander Bogaerts, SS BOS (93 OVR)
- Josh Bell, 1B PIT (93 OVR)
- Terry Pendleton, 3B STL (93 OVR)
- Tyler O’Neill, LF STL (92 OVR)
- Pablo Lopez, SP MIA (92 OVR)
- Jose Alvarado, RP TB (92 OVR)
- Andrew Benintendi, LF BOS (92 OVR)
- Enrique Hernandez, 2B LAD (92 OVR)
- Mike Yastrzemski, RF SF (92 OVR)
Vintage Collection
Collect Vintage Series player cards in the Vintage Collection, available in Legends and Flashbacks Collections, to add these Vintage Series players to your lineup:
- Collect 29 = Ketel Marte, 2B AZ (96 OVR)
- Collect 21 = Ubaldo Jimenez, SP COL (95 OVR)
- Collect 13 = Joc Pederson, LF LAD (94 OVR)
Chase Pack 11 Featuring 96 OVR Vintage Derek Jeter (New York Yankees)
MLB The Show 26 Vintage Card Series Reviews
The Vintage card art evokes the photo styles of mid-century Topps cards with some graphic design pizazz to make the cards look worn and ancient. It's a very cool card series concept that allowed the live content team to really cater to theme teams with this drop. This is a literal Captained theme team dream drop. Yeah, I got bars.
Anyway, it's another great design overall - but does it reshape the meta?
Not really. Maybe? Four cards from today's drop land in the top-25 overall Meta Overall rankings, with three of them being pitchers.
The new #23 Meta Overall card in all of Diamond Dynasty, Ubaldo Jimenez is one of my favorite pitchers to use. He has a great pitch mix that features a ton of movement, elite velocity including an Outlier Sinker, and extremely balanced overall attributes. Jimenez isn't even the "major" collection reward in this drop, but he's the card I want the most. With Parallel Mods this year, the ability to take a super balanced card like this and literally shape it into my "ideal" version of a given player has been a major reason why this is my favorite MLB The Show of all time.
Ubaldo Jimenez debuts as the #4 Meta Overall Starting Pitcher in Diamond Dynasty.
My favorite example of why metrics like Meta Overall are so cool from this drop, Vintage Jose Alvarado is a top-25 Meta Overall card and the new #3 Relief Pitcher in Diamond Dynasty. In a content drop that features a Hall of Famer like Derek Jeter, Alvarado showcases how cards have an effect on the meta versus name power.
There's plenty of good shortstops to choose from in Diamond Dynasty without needing to spend money or a ton of time acquiring them. If you look past the top-10 shortstops (the crazy expensive ones) you'll see a group of similarly rated, but uniquely built options. When a crazy-expensive Chase card like today's Vintage Derek Jeter drops, it grabs a ton of the attention without necessarily being the "best" card in the drop. Value, of course, is subjective and the current state of your squad will have a major effect on the impact any new cards have. Yet, a pack-card that will immediately float around quick-sell (4000ish Stubs) that ends up being a top-25 card at an always-capable-of-being-improved position seems like pretty great value to me.
The third aforementioned pitcher that landed in the top-25 overall Diamond Dynasty cards is Vintage Matt Strahm. Strahm falls just in front of the above mentioned Alvarado as the new #2 Meta Overall Relief Pitcher. He's also a very fascinating card, as he has extreme reverse platoon splits. Strahm is a lefty, so you'd think he was pretty good at getting lefty hitters out. Well, he can and will most of the time - but lefties will beat him up. On the literal other hand, righties have virtually no chance against this guy.
Max 125 H/9 against right-handed hitters with 102 Clutch makes Strahm a beast in high leverage innings for you, especially if you can play your match-ups favorably. What Strahm lacks in pure stuff (mid-90's fastball versus typical bullpen 100+ heat) he makes up for with elite Control for a reliever. He has a pretty good pitch mix and will be a solid addition to any bullpen.
Marte is perennially one of the most desired cards, and often ends up in this slot of expensive pack or collection card. The dude's cards are a literal cheat code, and Marte is one of those fabled "glitched" hitters that just seems to smash everything all of the time. Good defense at the premium positions in the middle of the diamond with good Speed on the switch-hitting, sweet-swinging Marte unsurprisingly becomes one of the best cards in the game. You should know what you're getting here by now, folks. Top-dollar collection cards are the "glitchy" cards that are popular across the community. They are for a very specific audience, and it's OK if you aren't part of that audience. The lower-tier collection rewards are there for that very reason.
I'll happily collect enough cards to unlock Ubaldo Jimenez. I know that I'll eventually be able to complete every single collection in this game, because SDS always makes it essentially free to unlock everything at the end of the content cycle. I'm too busy having fun with my Braves theme team in Ranked, and working on Parallel Mods with some of the coolest cards I've ever seen to get upset about the cards I'll never obtain.
A great side effect of this is the market impact on the live series collection. SDS has clearly been on a mission to bring the cost of the MLB Live Series collection down, as they've unprecedentedly (?) released several alternate versions of the highest-rated live series players. This almost never happens, but it's a sight for sore eyes as the cost of completing the collection has been absurdly high. This theme continues later on with another card we'll see, but the market has already reacted. With another roster update in the coming weeks, the live series collection might be considerably cheaper going into the All-Star Break when we'll get a legitimate meta-shifting content drop.
Vintage Ketel Marte debuts as the #7 Meta Overall Card in Diamond Dynasty, and will run you somewhere between 200,000 - 650,000 Stubs.
May Spotlight Drop 4 Program and Pack Breakdown
The featured cards in the Spotlight program this week are:
- Colt Emerson, 3B SEA (94 OVR)
- Adam Macko, RP TOR (92 OVR)
- Tommy Troy, LF AZ (92 OVR)
- The cards featured in the pack this week are:
- Colton Cowser, RF BAL (94 OVR)
- Kyle Harrison, SP MIL (94 OVR)
- Heriberto Hernandez, LF MIA (92 OVR)
- Reid Detmers, SP LAA (92 OVR)
- Bryan Torres, LF STL (92 OVR)
How To Complete Programs Quickly In MLB The Show 26
I completed both the Vintage program and the May Spotlight Week 4 Program simply by completing the new Vintage Conquest map. In fact, I completed those programs before I even finished the last stronghold if memory serves correct. This is amazing. I struggled mightily over the years to stay current on content because it was very rigid in how you completed everything. This year, you truly can complete new content by doing what you want without really having to interact with aspects of DD you might not enjoy.
I didn't even load up any Topps Now or Spotlight players, or Vintage players while working on the Conquest map. That used to be required to complete any programs, as missions were designed specifically requiring usage of new cards that weren't really that impressive.
I used my team with the players I want to use, and I knocked out the programs insanely quick. I had a ton of free packs to open, including three packs of the new premium set that just came out (Vintage) - this is a huge positive answer from SDS to the complaints from last year with packs and collections.
So how do you complete programs quickly in MLB The Show 26? Just literally play the game however you want.
Bonus May Spotlight Collection - 95 OVR Spotlight Aaron Judge (New York Yankees)
If you complete this week's May Spotlight program, and have completed all previous May programs, you'll be able to collect the four program reward cards to unlock a new Aaron Judge.
This is the other example today of the rather unprecedented approach by SDS to introduce better and cheaper versions of the most expensive live series cards. While the live series Judge will get Inside Edge boosts (which is relevant), this Spotlight version is better on paper.
Our wonderful visual display here shows us why the Spotlight version is slightly better overall. Meaningful increases in major attributes means everyone now has access to the best Aaron Judge in the game if they knock out four really quick programs using whatever cards they want. This is nothing short of a major win for everyone except those that don't like nice things.
Closing Thoughts
While it's a valid point that premium packs and collections have been pretty much the exclusive home of the "uber switch-hitting meta" cards, I actually enjoy working on them more because I'm just not personally interested in chasing the super expensive cards. That means the lower-tiered collection rewards become my obtainable chase cards, and it allows me to still have fun opening packs since I'm still missing most of the expensive diamonds in the live series collection.
Parallel Mods have helped make my Tier 3 Braves theme team so fun that I don't even care about the collection rewards. I'll probably downshift to Tier 2 soon to fit some more balance in, but that will still be a +4 to the major attributes on both sides of the ball. That's still very significant within the current power level of the card pool.
Another cool card series with cool art, and a pretty diverse mix of cards today that has pretty something for everyone.
What will you be grinding first? Let us know in the comments!
