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Finest Program Has Elly, Ohtani, Majesty, and Misfires
The Finest Program annually serves as a sort of year-end wrap-up of the MLB season that was in Diamond Dynasty, and typically touches on every team whether it is tied to Team Affinity or not. This year, it isn't — and while it's certainly got something for every team, the something everyone will want is clearly Elly De La Cruz, who arrives as the reward for a new Legends and Flashbacks Collection on top of Finest.
That's because Elly's close to game-breaking at shortstop — his towering height mattering there more than most any other position, and helping him snag liners to left center — when he doesn't have a ridiculously well-statted card, and this unquestionably is one of those. 101 Vision is the only thing holding him back from having 111 or better for every Hitting attribute, his 113/122 Power against righties and lefties respectively is absurd, his Fielding is near-perfect and his Speed should both back it up and make him a terror on the basepaths, and really the only quibble you could possibly have with a player whose 5.5-WAR season would have made him a leading NL MVP candidate in a year in which Pete Crow-Armstrong's 2026 season did not also occur and Shohei Ohtani didn't exist is that his 74 Arm Accuracy will mean the occasional errant throw.
But locking Elly behind a Legends and Flashbacks Collection that requires players obtain and lock in 32 of the 35 available Vouchers and Collection reward players from the suite of Diamond Dynasty content in MLB The Show 26 feels rather obviously like a misfire by Sony San Diego. That decision means you can technically obtain Elly by doing nothing to interact with the rest of the Finest content, and also means there's no more benefit toward getting Elly from completing the Finest Collection, which rewards a singular Voucher, than there is from having done your homework in the Field of Dreams or Awards Collections.
The rest of Finest does have plenty to like, with three meaty Programs and XP reward paths, though the PCA that ends the first one's XP reward path is a bummer: It simply isn't that great a hitter, with deeply disappointing 106/107 Contact numbers — for a player whose batting average was .280 to Elly's .283, for example — and his expectedly awesome five-tool profile is undermined by that Contact. Moments are rendered optional by the wealth of stat-based Missions in the three Programs, and there are tons of excellent players — Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Yordan Alvarez at the ends of the other two XP reward paths, but also stellar cards for 2026 standouts and DD favorites like Aroldis Chapman, Oneil Cruz, and Max Muncy (all in Finest 3) that feel like good fan service as free-with-sweat cards.
Where that fan service fails is in the deployment of three sets of Packs that contain another slew of Finest cards, including the Ohtani that was inevitable as a part of this Program being stuck in Finest Choice Pack 1, and in a series of Exchange sets for Finest cards — James Wood, Brice Turang, Yandy Diaz, and Parker Messick — that require Live Series Diamonds to complete. While that does allow those players who have kept Live Series Diamonds all year instead of selling them for Stubs to have a neat way to do binder clearance in November, it also obviously drives up the cost of those Diamonds for players who did do consistent sell-offs, and makes nabbing, say, Messick an annoying, labor-intensive task for a Guardians fan who might just want to play with the best version of her favorite player.
Relatively speaking, putting Ohtani in the Rare tier of a Pack that isn't that expensive (50,000 Stubs) and can be ripped eight times feels like par for the course. The Exchange Finest players? A thumb in the eye that players will remember.
There is also a Finest Event and Event Program. It's exactly what you might expect: Same structure of rewards (a couple of Events Rewind Packs, a Finest 2 Pack, a singular Premier Pack for full completion), same Missions, players from any 2026 Series are eligible. You might dabble; you might not.
And the Finest Conquest map and Mini Seasons do have some decent and meaningful rewards, but their best repeatable ones — a Headliners Pack for the map; a Vault Pack in Mini Seasons — just don't move the needle.
Final Roster Update Mints Four New Diamonds, Maintains Ohtani at 95 OVR
The Postseason having come and gone gives MLB The Show's devs one last chance to make edits to the 2026 Diamond Dynasty roster, and they did so with a generous helping of boosts to playoff performers.
The four new Diamonds to come from Friday's update — Bryan Baker, William Contreras, Trevor Megill, and Gavin Williams — all had fantastic Postseasons, with World Series MVP Contreras and Megill obviously contributing to their Brewers' romp to the MLB crown. And Baker and Williams are both names that have soared from the lower tiers of DD this year, meaning that players might well have stockpiled a bunch of them inadvertently over the months; it's always an unexpected delight to suddenly have thousands more Stubs available, if you want.
But the biggest bumps among relevant players are for Ben Rice, who jumps from 85 to 89 OVR after his dominant ALDS, and Michael King and Aaron Ashby, who were forgotten and languishing, respectively, as Silvers that probably should've had better Live Series cards for a long time.
And it simply feels wrong to have Shohei Ohtani's Live Series still at 95 OVR and the Red Diamond level after his last four months of the 2026 season featured zero starts as a pitcher and his last two included one home run. While Ohtani appeared to be on pace to challenge Jacob Misiorowski and others in the NL Cy Young race, his final start in July was not good — and much of his season as a designated hitter was merely good, not nearly up to the level that got him to Red Diamond status early on. Especially with the introduction of a superb endgame Ohtani in Finest, dinging the Live Series at year's end — which would, hopefully, have made that card more obtainable, and in turn lessened the exorbitant cost of the Live Series Collection for anyone still playing Diamond Dynasty in November.
Instead, players will still need to shell out more than 300,000 Stubs for the third-best Ohtani card in DD. Hope the 94 OVR Manny Ramirez and/or the 99 OVR Troy Tulowitzki that have been theoretically obtainable since the release of MLB The Show 26 but effectively hidden behind an Ohtani paywall still excite you on November 6!
Other News and Notes
- Were you hoping that the Chase Packs in the Show Shop last week would meaningfully dent the prices of some of the players in them? Well, Babe Ruth's still going for a million Stubs. Sorry!
- There is, against all odds, still more content coming in November in Diamond Dynasty. The in-game rundown advertises two new Programs for Friday, November 13; a new Conquest for Tuesday, November 17; and a bigger release on Friday, November 20, with the 10th Inning XP path, a Weekend Classic, and a new Program and Conquest.
