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Sony San Diego's final pre-release stream for MLB The Show 26 showed off a wide range of content. Here's a rundown.
World Baseball Classic Pool Programs, Collection Revealed
The four Pools that produced the round-robin play in the World Baseball Classic are the basis for the first WBC programs in Diamond Dynasty in MLB The Show 26, and they are loaded with dozens of WBC players.
Pool A was home to much of the Caribbean representation in the WBC, and its rewards, unlockable with program XP, include Puerto Rico's raucous Hiram Bithorn Stadium and an 89 OVR version of Nolan Arenado. Pool B, which saw the United States prevail despite a shocking loss to Italy, has a 89 OVR Bryce Harper as its best card. Pool C, home to most of the Asian and Oceanian representation, will be topped by an 89 OVR Hyun-Min Ahn, the 2025 KBO Rookie of the Year, and includes the Tokyo Dome as an unlockable. And Pool D is certainly last but not least thanks to its final reward of an 89 OVR Didi Gregorius, a Diamond Dynasty legend who has not appeared in the mode in several years.
That aforementioned program XP can be earned in the ways that will be familiar to DD players: Via Moments in which players can recreate reality in short, custom vignettes of gameplay, and Missions that allow players to accrue statistics or Parallel XP with players throughout DD's modes.
All of these WBC players — there are 10 on the reward path per Pool, some Gold and most Diamond, with packs awarded in those programs and elsewhere also sourcing them — funnel into an WBC Series Collection, where locking those players in as unsellable "collected" items grants rewards once enough players have been added. In this Collection, a titanic 110 such collected cards yields a 92 OVR Fernando Tatis Jr., with lower-OVR rewards — most notably 90 OVR Vinnie Pasquantino and Pete Crow-Armstrong items — unlocked at tiers leading up to Tatis.
And Tatis isn't actually the ultimate reward for the Collection: After the release of a fifth WBC program covering the quarterfinal, semifinal, and championship rounds of play that will take place in the next several days, the WBC MVP who is yet to earn that honor will get a card that is unlocked by an addition to the Collection.
1st Inning XP Reward Path Has Fewer "Bosses," Sellable Rewards
The reward path for XP earned throughout Diamond Dynasty that isn't program-specific, the Innings Program, is also back in DD for MLB The Show 26, but with a couple of key tweaks.
First, the number of players exclusive to the XP reward path has been reconfigured, with a third player being added to the path that has customarily offered two but the number of Bosses per Inning cut down from three to two — 90 OVR WBC Series versions Ronald Acuna Jr. and Munetaka Murakami serve as those Bosses for the 1st Inning — and only a singular Boss pack with a choice between the two Bosses available at the end of the set rewards for the Inning. The third player en route to the Boss pack — a 90 OVR Yoshinobu Yamamoto for the 1st Inning — is meant to be a Boss-level player, however.
Second, though, all of these players are now sellable, meaning that the Gleyber Torres on this 1st Inning path that would have been account-locked previously is now able to be sold off if Stubs are more important than a mid-level Diamond, and players could pay a premium to grab the Kyle Schwarber on the path from the marketplace prior to reaching that XP tier themselves.
These changes are mostly likely to be felt in the prices of the true Bosses, which are now significantly more rare as one-per-account prizes for topping out in the XP reward path.
Tulowitzki, Hernandez, Pujols Highlight Live Series Collections
The crowning achievement of the collection aspect of Diamond Dynasty in MLB The Show remains the completion of the various Live Series Collections that require adding 40 players per MLB team to each of 30 distinct Team Collections to unlock players that funnel into divisional and league collections, then finally into the Live Series Collection.
Each of the six divisions has its own reward for collecting all of the necessary players from each division's teams:
- AL East: 92 OVR Dustin Pedroia
- AL Central: 93 OVR
- AL West: 90 OVR Chone Figgins
- NL East: 92 OVR Ken Singleton
- NL Central: 90 OVR Jeromy Burnitz
- NL West: 94 OVR Roy Campanella
Those divisional players then funnel into American and National League Collections, whose rewards are 99 OVR Felix Hernandez (AL) and Albert Pujols (NL) cards that have the new Red Diamond treatment, and into the Live Series Collection, whose ultimate reward is a 99 OVR Troy Tulowitzki. Tulo is maybe not as high-profile as some Live Series Collection rewards past — he won't make the Hall of Fame, like Carlos Beltrán, who was MLB The Show 25's equivalent player — but his card being tied to his 2009 cycle means that it's loaded with great attributes and his positional value as a speedy shortstop who can still hit for power and contact and defend makes him effectively the best player at maybe the premium position in Diamond Dynasty for what should be most of the game's lifespan.
There are worse things to get at the end of the rainbow for the grind that is the Live Series Collection.
Other Diamond Dynasty Content
- Diamond Quest, the signature addition to DD in MLB The Show 25, is back with no mentioned changes. Two will be available at launch: One, intended as a tutorial, has unsellable rewards, but the second has sellable versions of Bobby Grich, Eddie Mathews, Stan Musial, and Bob Feller, the former as Rare-tier rewards and the latter as Epic-tier prizes.
- Showdown returns with a WBC-flavored version at launch. Its minor change for this specific Showdown: Each win over the Mini-Bosses en route to the final Showdown will grant individual card rewards in DD, not just the Stubs and the in-Showdown lineup additions.
- Mini Seasons has the repeatedly advertised custom WBC simulation — locked to the seven games the WBC champion could play — and Classic Mode available at launch. The former has four WBC players as individual rewards for advancing to the quarterfinals, semifinals, and final, and also for winning the whole dang thing.
- Spring Breakout and St. Patrick's Day programs are scheduled to arrive next week.
