Breaking Down Diamond Dynasty's Six New Season 1 Captains

Friday’s latest content drop in Diamond Dynasty brought a lot of sweeping changes to the card-collecting game mode, including a massive roster update adjusting Live Series cards, a new The Show Classics Program, the latest Chase Pack, and even a new Mini Season.

The most important change from a metagame standpoint, however, may have been the introduction of six new 95 OVR Captains cards with powerful boosts that shake up the optimal team construction for online play.

The New Captains

These six Captains cards all check in at 95 OVR and are available from a new Season 1 Captains pack in the store that is available for 40,000 Stubs and can be purchased twice. These Captains are also sellable, meaning that players can simply obtain all six by buying two packs and the remaining four cards from the marketplace.

Trevor Hoffman: 45 Saves Captain

The first alphabetically of them is Padres closer Trevor Hoffman, whose 45 Saves Captain title may be the oddest of the bunch. The Hoffman card itself is a great version of the circle change warlock who baffled so many for San Diego for so many years, with that 73 MPH pitch having 99 Control and Break individually and the rest of his repertoire — four-seam fastball, cutter, slider, curveball — playing off it beautifully. 117 Hits/9 and 111 K/9 plus 125 Clutch is going to be hell on opponent PCIs.

But if you surround Hoffman with pitchers who have tallied 45 saves in a season, he and they get better.

View Players Eligible for Hoffman boost

Tier 1 Boost: Four pitchers, +5 H/9 and K/9

Tier 2 Boost: Six pitchers, +10 H/9 and K/9, +5  Pitching Clutch

Tier 3 Boost: Eight pitchers, +15 H/9 and K/9, +10 Pitching Clutch and +10 BB/9

Those boosts max out Hoffman’s H/9 and K/9, and get his BB/9 to 99, but they will obviously be more valuable on relievers who are NOT Hall of Famers and have more distance to the full red bars or glowing 100+ stats. The trick is, of course, finding and rostering them: 45 saves is a fairly rare feat of late, with no MLB player getting there since Edwin Díaz had 57 in 2018, and many of the players who have accomplished it recently have also seen their careers winding down.

That said, the full boost does wonders for the Live Series Díaz and Craig Kimbrel, and you can reach further back into history for names like Dennis Eckersley, Eric Gagne, and even John Smoltz — a sneaky great choice here, as his starter cards should be eligible for the boost — to get to the thresholds necessary. One unfortunate and probably intentional omission? Billy Wagner, whose most saves in a season was 44.

Clayton Kershaw: Lefty Captain

If 45-save seasons is an arbitrary and unusual feat to build a theme team around, being left-handed is by contrast simple and self-explanatory. And picking Kershaw, the best southpaw of his generation, as the Lefty Captain makes plenty of sense.

Kershaw’s card itself is puzzling and not nearly as dominant as the 99s that have been issued in DD editions past. Its 101 Stamina and BB/9 both play, and his 109 Pitching Clutch reflects his shutdown skills — if not his relative lack of playoff success, which to be fair has nothing to do with Pitching Clutch in MLB The Show — but it is dated to his age-27 season in 2015, when he posted a career high for strikeouts with 301 … and it has a mere 80 K/9.

But this is a Kersh that boosts southpaws and lefty bats … and position players who throw lefty but bat righty. And it does so significantly.

View Players Eligible for Kershaw boost

Tier 1 Boost: 13 left-handed hitters and pitchers, +5 H/9, Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch

Tier 2 Boost: 18 left/handed hitters and pitchers, +10 H/9, Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch

Tier 3 Boost: 22 left/handed hitters and pitchers, +15 H/9, Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch

Those requirements are a lot, to be clear, the most of any Captain not just in this release but in Diamond Dynasty. But the value is immense, especially at that highest tier, and that there are no qualifiers other than being left-handed — whether as a pitcher or a fielder or a batter — means that hundreds and hundreds of cards qualify. If you’re willing to build out a squad full of lefties, there are rewards to reap here.

The problem with that: There just aren’t many great lefty pitchers in Diamond Dynasty at the moment, especially free ones. Four of the five starters at or above Kershaw’s own 95 OVR are deep within collection rewards or XP paths — Andy Pettitte, Babe Ruth, Al Leiter, and Fernando Valenzuela — and many of the others at or above 90 OVR are still pricy pickups, to say nothing of the shortage of lefty relievers. Lefty bats are easier to find — and one of them is the Live Series Shohei Ohtani, who with the hitting boosts from Kershaw would have 116/117 Contact/Power — and there are more than a few right-handed batters who throw left-handed, maybe most notably Rickey Henderson, but to maximize this boost, players will need to almost entirely lefty-fy their lineup, rotation, and bullpen.

Is that worth it at this stage in the game? Probably not. Will it be worth it someday? Almost certainly.

David Ortiz: 2000’s Hitters Captain

Ortiz dominated the 2000s with the Red Sox, so it’s no surprise to see him as a Captain card for that era. What is a little surprising — and limiting — is Ortiz’s boosts being in the vein of his own skills rather than broad.

View Players Eligible for Ortiz boost

Tier 1 Boost: Five hitters from the years 2000 to 2009, +5 Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch

Tier 2 Boost: Eight hitters, +10 Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch; +5 Contact Vs. Left

Tier 3 Boost: 11 hitters, +15 Contact/Power Vs. R, Batting Clutch; +10 Contact Vs. Left

That skew toward helping hitters against right-handers is naturally going to help lefty bats a bit more, making a Kershaw/Ortiz pairing pretty interesting. But players will have to be picking Legends players almost exclusively for the boost, as very, very few active players — Andrew McCutchen and Joey Votto are two — were around for even the 2009 season. (Votto’s Team Affinity card also already has maxed-out Power against righties, negating a benefit of mixing him in.)

That makes the pool of players who are going to be great fits for this Ortiz rather small for now, and probably means this Captain is one to be saved for later in the game cycle.

Ortiz himself is what you’d expect, too: A dominant bat against lefties who essentially has to be either a designated hitter or a bench bat because of his atrocious defense. Some things don’t change!

Mark Prior: Standout Series Captain

It could be worse, though: Ortiz could be the Captain of a single lightly populated Series like the Mark Prior Captain is.

View Players Eligible for Prior boost

Tier 1 Boost: Three Standout Series players on squad, +10 K/9, Power vs. R; +5 H/9

Tier 2 Boost: Six Standout Series players on squad, +15 K/9, Power vs. R; +10 H/9, Batting Clutch

Tier 3 Boost: Nine Standout Series players on squad, +20 K/9, Power vs. R, Batting Clutch; +15 H/9

The boosts are nice, yeah: In theory, they’re morphing some lefty bats from good to great and some pitchers from excellent elite.

But there are currently just 12 Standout Series cards in all of Diamond Dynasty. More than half of them are collection or XP reward path cards that require significant grinding, and of the remaining five, three are not currently in packs. This is an expensive boost to activate, and if you don’t have the cards already, it might not be worth even trying out for quite some time.

But a pitching Captain giving +20 boosts to hitters should be tucked away for future reference.

Carlos Santana: Switch Hitters Captain

Carlos Santana does not need to be tucked away, in contrast. If you have even a little bit of interest in the popular switch hitters theme team, he is maybe even worth activating immediately.

View Players Eligible for Santana boost

Tier 1 Boost: Seven switch hitters, +5 Contact vs. R/L

Tier 2 Boost: 10 switch hitters, +8 Contact vs. R/L; +5 Batting Clutch

Tier 3 Boost: 13 switch hitters, +12 Contact vs. R/L; +10 Batting Clutch, BB/9

The oddity of that BB/9 boost aside — maybe it’s a hat tip to Santana being a catcher, though he’s not exactly known for his work behind the dish — the value here is as straightforward as is gets: Switch hitters get better Contact and Clutch, with the boosts being more modest because switch-hitting itself is generally a plus.

The Santana card itself is also a menace, with Vision as its only non-bunting batting stat under 91, and its defense isn’t even bad enough to necessitate playing it at the secondary position of first.

There aren’t that many excellent switch hitters in Diamond Dynasty yet, but this week brought no fewer than four at 93 OVR or better — Niko Goodrum, Cal Raleigh, Keibert Ruiz, and Jonatan Clase — and top-flight versions of Chipper Jones and Mickey Mantle are always lurking. (A surprising number of those switch hitters are catchers, making for a bit of a logjam at the position.)

Keeping the boosts on this Santana from being completely game-changing is likely all that keeps it from being an endgame Captain — in late April.

Seiya Suzuki: Asian Born Captain

Finally, there is the Captain who might just permanently install one card in the metagame: Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki, whose boosts are perfect for enhancing the recent wave of elite talents from the Far East, especially that one leading the wave.

His boost has some very specific requirements: It reads “players born in Asia or who have represented an Asian national team (boost includes Lars Nootbaar and Tommy Edman).” Those two American-born Cardinals represented Japan and South Korea, respectively, at the World Baseball Classic, and throwing them in this pool makes for a funny Cubs/Cardinals theme team of mortal rivals.

But let’s be honest: This is about Shohei.

View Players Eligible for Suzuki boost

Tier 1 Boost: Three players, +10 Contact/Power vs. R, BB/9; +5 H/9

Tier 2 Boost: Five players, +15 Contact/Power vs. R, BB/9; +10 H/9

Tier 3 Boost: +20 Contact/Power vs. R, BB/9; +15 H/9

Add those maximum boosts, which essentially require six cards and Live Series Ohtani, and that Ohtani now has 121/122 Contact/Power against righties and 116 H/9 and 71 BB/9, both bolstering the greatest strength and shoring up the major weakness of his card.

And the requirements are such that it really isn’t hard to make it work. Ha Seong Kim from the Seoul Series pack, the new Kenta Maeda from the The Show Classics program, Jung Ho Lee’s Topps Now card, and Kodai Senga’s Cornerstone Captain are all free, and adding a couple of other Live Series cards — even ones that stay stashed on benches — rounds out the squad nicely. And with Shota Imanaga having a brilliant season so far and players like Yoshinobu Yamamoto having good cards, there is the potential for this boost to help cards other than Ohtani become lineup mainstays.

But for now, this is mostly about boosting one player — and so the primary issue is, uh, owning the Live Series Ohtani, which is still among the six-figure cards on the marketplace and is unlikely to go down without significant intervention from Sony San Diego, like a flash sale on 90+ Live Series Diamonds. Players lucky enough to have pulled Ohtani or industrious enough to have the Stubs to buy him can now make him even better.

The rest of us can dream.