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Wild Card Series Programs Cook Up Rice, Riley
The Wild Card Series of the 2026 MLB Postseason are all done and dusted, and the Braves, Padres, White Sox, and Yankees have all prevailed to advance to the Division Series. But it's the victors and their vanquished foes who get content in the form of programs for each individual Wild Card series that mix Moments and Missions and hold some decent cards as rewards.
The best of those rewards are probably Yankees first baseman Ben Rice and Braves third baseman Austin Riley, each of whom hit big homers to propel their teams. Rice gets a card that has his great bat and also the useful functionality of catcher as a secondary position, and while he's probably better-suited to actually playing first thanks to some dire defensive attributes, he's needed an upgrade for a while. Riley, on the other hand, has been dismal for much of 2026 for the Braves, and shocked many with his late homer to lift them over the Phillies in Game 1 of their Wild Card series, so getting a 99 OVR card for that homer that essentially ignores his seasonal stat line in favor of making him an excellent defensive third baseman with a well-rounded hitting profile and really good Speed (74) for the position is a very nice come-up for Braves fans who have been waiting for a better Chipper Jones since April, haven't gotten to use a good Riley, and are a little tired of Terry Pendleton. (Not that I'd personally know!)
The other program-topping cards are Padres third baseman Gavin Sheets, a fine lefty bat at first base among a sea of them, and White Sox second baseman Chase Meidroth, a very good contact hitter who doesn't have as much power as you might like. And Meidroth isn't quite as good as a contact guy as Nico Hoerner, whose lowest Contact stat is 116 Vision.
The other really big name in these Wild Card programs is Chris Sale — and he is here as a closer, helpfully, after finishing off the Phillies in Game 3 on Thursday. The Braves' long-running glut of starting pitching options actually makes a Sale that can close a lot more valuable to Braves theme teams than a better starter might have been, and capturing the moment of him doing something unusual — which he has now done for both the Red Sox and Braves in his career — is a nice way of appreciating a nearly unique moment that the Postseason brought, just like making Andrew Painter's card reflective of his relief efforts in Game 2 for the Phillies and giving Alec Bohm an actually usable card following a great series that departed from his own disappointing season.
Retro Wild Card, Division Series Programs Flash Back to Playoffs Past
On top of the content for the 2026 Postseason, Sony San Diego is smartly supplementing it with content honoring Postseasons past, and that so far has manifested with the Retro Wild Card and Retro Division Series programs. The Retro Wild Card one arrived on Tuesday, with the Division Series one following this Friday, and both effectively let stars of prior years get great cards that don't have to reflect anything going on in our current reality.
For the Retro Wild Card program, that means putting a 99 OVR Giancarlo Stanton with titanic Power (125/120 R/L) in Yankees fans' hands that can be a fine card for the 2021 version of Stanton and not the 2026 one that has three homers in 90 at-bats and was a slightly surprising inclusion on the Yankees' playoff roster. In the Retro Division Series program, giving Anthony Santander — a perennial favorite of DD players as a switch-hitting machine — a card for his 2023 ALDS heroics with the Orioles is a nice gesture to fans from Charm City, and giving Phillies fans a Rhys Hoskins commemorating a series that they won is ... well, it's kind of mean, but at least the Phillies get more than just Painter and Bohm?
Both of these programs are unfortunately Moments plus Missions just like the various Wild Card series programs, so players will need to go through the tedium of dozens of Moments for full progress.
Carter Jensen, Lance Berkman Earn September Lightning Honors
With one full round of Postseason play done, it obviously feels a little late to be trotting out the September Spotlight Program's final dregs on this Friday, even if it's only October 2. Does having Lance Berkman and Carter Jensen as the Lightning and Retro Lightning players for September compensate for that?
Well, maybe. But isn't it odd that only one of the two is from a Postseason participant?
Jensen is the September Lightning player, and the Blue Jays catcher won't be playing playoff baseball this year, but he did have a significant role in Toronto's run to the World Series last year, and also had a fantastic month of power hitting, cranking eight homers and posting a wildly impressive 221 wRC+. For this, he gets to be a fantastic lefty catcher, with 118 Contact and 125 Power against righties and an additional 125 Batting Clutch. The rest of his stats — 106/111 Contact/Power against lefties, merely pretty good defensive and arm stats, and 71 Speed that does certainly play — probably keep him from being a true contender for being the best catcher in DD, but he's solidly within the top five. And, it bears noting, he's "free" like all the Lightning players have been.
The Retro Lightning status Berkman gets means he's not free, and not even particularly close, so Big Puma needs a great card to compensate for that. This one, on paper, is arguably close but probably not quite there — 104 Vision is his lowest Hitting attribute, but none of the rest are going to make the 120s without Parallel modding except for his 125 Contact against righties — save for his nearly unique status as a switch-hitter with first base eligibility, which ought to qualify him as effectively a first baseman rather than a right fielder. And playing him there instead of in the outfield renders his 76 Speed really good for the position and his yellowed attributes as a fielder and thrower of baseballs almost irrelevant; he'll do more damage at the plate for teams than he ever could to them in the field.
As usual, you'll need to collect all of the Spotlight Drop XP reward path players in the Lightning Collection to earn Jensen, and a substantial subset of the Spotlight Pack players — 13 here — to get Berkman.
Elsewhere in the program, Brett Baty gets the Retro Lightning mid-path card, unlockable via eight lock-ins, and carries a kind of unusual build: He's a utility man who is a decent lefty bat and could play any position but catcher, in theory, but probably isn't a good enough lefty bat (125/110 Contact/Power against righties, 125 Clutch) to demand to be played except as a piece of a Mets theme team and doesn't crack 100 in any of the other hitting attributes before Parallels or a theme team boost. Riley Greene, September Spotlight Drop 4's XP reward path card, is a fine reverse-split lefty bat (125/125 Contact/Power against lefties and 123 Clutch) who is more very good and limited by 63 Speed as an outfield defender. And the best Spotlight card of all of these for some players will actually be Eugenio Suárez, who gets a pseudo-tribute card for cresting 350 career homers, given its 120/121 Power and Geno's always buttery swing.
Other News and Notes
- The time-limited Regular Season Finale Event and Event Program are probably the best way to get Spetember Spotlight cards and defray the cost of unlocking Berkman for grinding the game, and both run until next Friday, October 9, with the standard Event Program Missions.
- Chase Pack 29's big fish is, well, a big fish: It's a 99 OVR Mike Trout from his 2016 MVP campaign, one of those mythic cards with almost no yellow anywhere to be seen. It's maybe not quite as powerful as the best Trout card in Diamond Dynasty should be, but there's little doubt this will be a coveted five-tool player who is very good to great at everything asked of him.
- This week's seemingly random Player Program is one for Francisco Lindor, whose 300th homer came in the last game of the Mets' season to forget and is thus memorialized with a fine switch-hitting shortstop that certainly reflects Lindor's scintillating career more than his relatively underachieving 2026 season. In case you need to speed up getting this Lindor, there's a Bonus Mission for having hit 300 homers in DD this year.
- No new Conquest maps, Diamond Quest boards, or Mini Seasons campaign for the Postseason means that the Moments really are the "gameplay" portion of any Postseason content for now. Whether that satisfies you as a player is up to you to decide. But new Diamond Quest and Mini Seasons content is promised for next Friday, along with a new Event Program.
- The last regular season roster update is a buried undercard for this Friday's content, and that's entirely fine: It yielded just two new Diamonds, and those are Mookie Bets and Cade Smith, each of whom have had plenty of excellent cards before. Getting the red-hot Fernando Tatis Jr. back into the 90s in ratings — given his 1.066 OPS since September began, he had an argument to be the September Lightning player ... even though he was already a Retro Lightning player — is nice work, though, and making sure to adjust all of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Yordan Alvarez, Jacob Misiorowski, and Cam Schlittler just slightly is a hat tip to the likely AL and NL MVP and Cy Young recipients.
- Also on the Coming Soon tab: 2026 Division Series programs, likely in a batch after the last of them is complete, and a Retro Championship Series Program for Tuesday, October 13.
