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Two similarly titanic players take the Lightning honors for April. One is much more obtainable than the other.
Elly De La Cruz and Chipper Jones are April Lightning, Retro Lightning Players
The April Lightning player for Diamond Dynasty in MLB The Show 26 is a former cover athlete and switch-hitter whose unique skills should make his card a top-of-the-meta choice for a long while. The April Retro Lightning player for Diamond Dynasty in MLB The Show 26 is ... a former cover athlete and switch-hitter whose unique skills should make his card a top-of-the-meta choice for a long while.
Way to get creative, SDS.
Jokes aside, Elly De La Cruz and Chipper Jones being the April Lightning and April Retro Lightning selections, announced and released on Tuesday, May 5, is both good and instructive of how San Diego Studio is likely to handle its de facto player of the month honors in DD this season.
The 94 OVR De La Cruz is the "free" card of the two, and likely the less exciting of them by acclamation. While he's a good contact hitter and an especially good power hitter against lefties, this version of one of the three MLB The Show 25 cover athletes is not a particularly speedy one — fair, for an eight-steal month that pales in comparison to tallies of 18 and 13 stolen bases through April in his last two seasons — but likely to be a dynamite defender at shortstop thanks to his powerful arm. And yet he's also likely to be the No. 2 shortstop in Diamond Dynasty — behind the 99 OVR Troy Tulowitzki that requires millions of Stubs to unlock as the Live Series Collection reward — for weeks if not months.
The 94 OVR Chipper is decidedly not free, and will require locking in 16 Spotlight Series cards — ones specifically from Spotlight Series Packs, not earned freely — to unlock. But he's probably the best contact hitting option in all of Diamond Dynasty, with triple-digit Contact against both righties and lefties and triple-digit Clutch even before any Parallel or other boosts. This card honors his April 2005, a month with just four homers, so his power is appreciably lower than his prime-era cards might have, and there's no speed threat from a player entering his mid-30s, but it should still be a solid defender at third that will make few errors. (And yes, Chipper covered the MLB series of video games once, too: He was MLB 2001's cover boy several years before Sony's baseball series transitioned to MLB The Show and from 989 Studios to San Diego Studio.)
April Spotlight Drop 5 Enables Lightning Collections
Of course, De La Cruz and Jones are not the only parts of the final flourish of the April Spotlight programming that were released on Tuesday. April Spotlight Drop 5, a super-sized month-in-review piece of the weekly Spotlight drops, arrived with a slew of Topps Now and Spotlight Series players, led by Yankees first baseman Ben Rice and Braves first baseman Matt Olson.
Rice is the carrot at the end of the relatively simple Spotlight Drop 5 XP reward path — its hardest Mission being 10,000 Parallel XP with any players, easily attainable in a couple hours of play — and reflects his month spent as arguably the best hitter in baseball, with great Contact stats and better Power and little else to care much about on a card that could well be a designated hitter ... or a catcher playing at a secondary position whose defense would be far below average but more than compensated for by his bat.
Olson, by contrast, is a whiz at first as a defender and a devastating lefty bat against righties, but is merely above average against lefties. And without any secondary eligibility, he's really locked to first or DHing in a way that Rice is obviously not, making the XP reward path player earned by grinding better than the best Spotlight player in packs for possibly the first time in DD this season.
Olson is joined at the 93 OVR Rare tier in Spotlight Drop 5 packs by Rockies hurler Chase Dollander, whose combo of fastball and sinker makes him a tough-to-time flamethrower, and Diamondbacks slapper Ildemaro Vargas, whose hitting streak lasted almost the entirety of May and whose switch-hitting and eligibility throughout the infield and in left makes him a close second to Olson in that top tier despite not being a power threat against right-handers.
How to Get Lightning Elly De La Cruz, Chipper Jones
The methods of obtaining De La Cruz and Jones could scarcely be more different, and this disparity is probably the most important piece of the Spotlight programs' design.
For Elly, players will need to finish the XP reward paths for each of the five April Spotlight Drops, obtaining the five respective unsellable Spotlight players from them, and lock them into the April Lightning Collection. This is as simple and straightforward as Collections get in Diamond Dynasty, and makes Elly a "free" player in most regards, as all that is needed to add him to your roster is a little sweat equity.
To obtain Chipper, however, players must add 16 (of 18 total) of the Spotlight Series players released in April Spotlight Packs to the April Retro Lightning Collection, turning them from sellable cards worth valuable Stubs to unsellable items locked to an account. And while players have been able to obtain nine Spotlight Packs that could contain cards eligible for this Collection, just one of those nine — only released yesterday in the April Spotlight Drop 5 XP reward path — has guaranteed such a card, meaning that it's possible that Diamond Dynasty diehards could have finished all five April Spotlight Drop XP reward paths and nabbed the four April Spotlight Packs currently available via the April Showcase Event's own XP reward path but low-rolled all of those Packs to only have a single card ready for the Chipper Collection.
This is, to put it lightly, a major pain point for DD, and though there's another of these April Spotlight Packs available as a pre-Chipper reward in the Collection itself — at five cards collected, alongside a Jose Soriano that does not go into the Collection at 10 — it is likely that most players will need to fork over hundreds of thousands of Stubs to get a player solidly within the top 10 of all DD cards at present.
Such is the nature of the Retro Lightning portion of Spotlight. And so will it be all year, in all likelihood.
