The Eight Best Theme Teams in Diamond Dynasty for Season 1

As Season 1 draws to a close in MLB The Show 24’s Diamond Dynasty mode, the available player pool is about as broad and deep as it will get for the season, with scores of 99 overall cards existing for players to use in assembling their god squads and theme teams. And with dozens of Captains cards giving stat boosts to various segments of that player pool, there has not been a better time to build one of those theme teams – and maybe turn one of those theme teams into a god squad that can dominate these waning days of Season 1.

Here are our choices, in no particular order, for the eight best theme teams of Season 1 in Diamond Dynasty.

Smooth Switch: The Switch-Hitting Theme Team

Ask any player spending substantial time in Diamond Dynasty’s online multiplayer, and there is probably little argument against the switch-hitting theme team being the most popular one in the game at the moment. It’s understandable: That is also probably the best theme team at present.

The idea of switch-hitting alone is rather valuable in both baseball in reality and MLB The Show. Facing a pitcher from the side of the plate where pitches will break in on a hitter’s hands rather than away from them allows players to generate more power and better contact for the most part, and forces pitchers to do more than throw breaking balls away from the sweet spots for batters, inviting soft contact.

The popularity of the switch-hitting theme team, though, is more attributable to the boost that is available through the 95 Carlos Santana Switch Hitters Captain card, which enables good switch-hitters to become elite ones. Obtained from the Season 1 Captains Pack for 40,000 Stubs or on the market for more like 20-25K Stubs, Santana’s card itself is a banger from both sides of the plate with a smooth – do you get it? – swing and eligibility at both catcher and first base – but it’s obviously the boosts, which max out at +12 for Contact from both sides of the plate, +10 to Batting Clutch, and +10 to BB/9 for pitchers, that players enjoy most about Santana.

That boost requires 13 switch-hitters, which is a substantial ask: With just over 130 switch-hitters currently available in Diamond Dynasty, you’re looking at adding about a tenth of that segment of the player pool to your squad to make the most of the Santana card’s benefits. But a lot of those cards, especially at higher ratings, have been very recent releases, and a surprising number are free in the sense that they cost no Stubs to acquire: The 99s for Eduardo Escobar and Brian Roberts are both in Team Affinity Chapter 3, Jurickson Profar is the reward path player for Season Awards Drop 7, and Jimmy Rollins is one of the Season 1 XP reward path bosses.

But the top-tier options for the switch-hitting theme team that aren’t free are expensive, with the 99 Adley Rutschman that is arguably the best switch hitter in the game likely to run players at least 160K Stubs and the 99 Ketel Marte that helps a lot with the positional flexibility of the roster construction here checking in around 80K Stubs. And that positional flexibility really matters: An inordinate number of the best switch hitters available right now are primary shortstops or catchers, and while many of the shortstops have secondary positions, the catchers often don’t. This makes players at positions where switch hitters are more scarce that much more valuable.

And if there’s a glaring weakness for the switch hitting theme team in Season 1, it’s that the most feared switch hitters in baseball history largely do not have great Diamond Dynasty cards yet. As of May 24, the best Mickey Mantle in DD is a 91, the best Chipper Jones is an 87, and the best Tim Raines is an 80. Those are three big names who will assuredly get better cards as the year goes on, but their best cards right now are not elite ones.

Key cards: 95 Captains Carlos Santana, 99 Season Awards Jurickson Profar, 93 Pipeline Jasson Dominguez

Strengths: Uh, the great switch-hitting? You read those paragraphs above, right?

Weaknesses: Cost, lack of high-end cards for elite players, positional logjams

Top tip: Switch-hitting pitchers count for the boost even if they do not bat, so Kenley Jansen and Adam Ottavino make for good relievers on this team.

Braves’ New World: The Atlanta Braves Theme Team

It’s no big secret that the Atlanta Braves have one of the better teams in Major League Baseball in 2024 and have been one of the better franchises in the sport for much of the last 40 years, and so it’s no surprise that the Braves theme team is a potentially dominant one in Diamond Dynasty. But how dominant the Braves are might be surprising.

They have 99 starting pitchers of both the righty and lefty varieties in Spencer Strider and Tom Glavine. They have depth at lefty starter, too, with 96 Max Fried and 94 Mike Soroka cards. Their best hitter is a free 99 Freddie Freeman that absolutely mashes right-handers, and also slides nicely to designated hitter to make room for Matt Olson’s similar profile and better defense at first. Their outfield is good enough that Michael Harris II’s Live Series Diamond should come off the bench; their bullpen has several good options; their Live Series cards almost all having room to be upgraded should their vaunted offense turn things around in real life makes for a rare opportunity to buy low on a premier team and still have potential upside.

The downsides of the Braves theme team are seen well in their relatively underwhelming Captains cards, with Dansby Swanson and Tyler Matzek being good cards more because of a lack of great Braves shortstops – Swanson is legitimately the best one in the game, and might be for a while, as Ozzie Albies doesn’t have shortstop as a secondary position on his 98 card and lacks the arm strength to be good at the position in any iteration – and their boosts rather than as cards on their own. It seems likely that any future Braves Captains cards will also have to be relatively underwhelming so as to preserve as many of the bigger-name cards for other programs within Diamond Dynasty, though Greg Maddux having a Cornerstone Captain card does suggest that the Braves might be owed one in that regard.

But one of the best and most popular teams in MLB is one of the best and ought to be one of the most popular theme teams in MLB The Show. This will be, well, a theme.

Key cards: 99 Awards Freddie Freeman, 98 Awards Ozzie Albies, 93 Breakout Eddie Mathews, 87 Captains Dansby Swanson and Tyler Matzek

Strengths: Pitching depth, high-end hitters, mix of current and past players

Weaknesses: Shortstop, cost, uninspiring Captains

Top tip: While the 87 Chipper Jones is far from the best Chipper that Diamond Dynasty will see, it does get boosted substantially by both the Carlos Santana and David Ortiz Captains cards, if players want to hybridize their theme teams.

New York, New York: The New York Yankees Theme Team

The New York Yankees are the most storied franchise in MLB history. Their theme team is excellent in MLB The Show – and it is going to get much, much better.

The nice thing about any Yankees theme team in Diamond Dynasty is that there’s no chance it will be hurting for legendary and iconic players, and the MLB The Show 24 cycle is providing maybe even more than usual in that regard: Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Rich “Goose” Gossage, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera are mainstays in DD, and Derek Jeter has become integral to the last couple of releases after making his long-awaited debut a year ago. A better version of Gehrig, too, is seemingly imminent, and CC Sabathia is perhaps the biggest name of the new crop of pitching Legends that has joined the game this year.

It’s such an embarrassment of riches that it is almost never mentioned that neither Yogi Berra nor Joe DiMaggio – arguably the best and a top-five player in baseball’s history at their positions, respectively, and singularly iconic players in pop culture – are part of the Diamond Dynasty player pool.

But the Yankees at least aspiring to adding to their towering heap of World Series titles in the modern day also means that great players still suit up in pinstripes, and adding those titans of the past to standouts of today makes for a great theme team.

Maybe the biggest ding on the Yankees theme team on the field is the lack of a truly top-tier right-handed pitching, with a 98 Finest Jonathan Loaisiga reliever from the The Show Classics program and a 97 Topps Now Luis Gil not exactly balancing out 99s of Ruth, Sabathia and Andy Pettitte. And the difficulty of obtaining the best Yankees cards – that trio of Pettitte, Ruth, and Sabathia is all “free” but requires scores of hours of gameplay, the full Live Series collection, and hundreds of cards from the Season 1 Collection to obtain, respectively – makes this a team that players really have to earn rather than buy. And their Captains are Whitey Ford and Don Mattingly – players who will have better versions eclipse those Captains before too long.

But the multiple dynastic periods of Yankees baseball has yielded a dominant squad in Diamond Dynasty. And as the Legends of the past get better cards and superstars of the present show out in reality, that team is only going to get deeper and deeper.

Key cards: 99 Hall of Fame Babe Ruth, 99 Hyper Andy Pettitte and CC Sabathia, 99 Finest Jorge Posada

Strengths: Everything, basically

Weaknesses: Right-handed pitching, time investment to obtain

Top tip: With no great Jeter or Juan Soto cards available now, the prices on some of the pieces of what will be a great theme team for the duration of Diamond Dynasty may be momentarily low. Hunt for bargains!

Southpaw Supremacy: The Lefty Theme Team

Can you hit from the south side of the plate? Sling it southpaw? The wildly expansive lefty theme team might be for you.

Enabled by the 95 Lefty Captain Clayton Kershaw – without which building a team almost entirely or wholly comprised of lefties is more silly than strategic – the lefty theme team allows for players to double down on left-handed hitters and pitchers’ natural advantages against right-handed pitchers and hitters by boosting all of Contact against righties, Power against righties, and Batting Clutch by double digits when the boost is maxed out.

The trick is maxing out that boost, which requires a whopping 22 players who hit and/or pitch left-handed, and does not include switch hitters. There is no shortage of lefties in Diamond Dynasty, with 25 lefties having 99 overall cards already, but those cards run the gamut from great pitchers to elite relievers to badly unbalanced hitters, and committing to making a full lefty theme team happen might require putting hitters in the lineup that struggle against lefty pitching.

So maybe the play is a hybrid theme team that uses Kershaw as the pitching Captain and a team-specific hitting captain or one of the Santana and Ortiz Captains that boosts switch-hitting or era-specific players, aiming for a lower level of the Kershaw boost, and eliminating that weakness while sacrificing a bit of strength.

Or maybe the parade of elite left-handed pitchers who have been a plague on the online metagame will continue, and there’s really not as much in-game viability online to stacking a lineup with lefties despite the big boosts Kershaw can grant and the ample supply of left-handed players of all sorts. This is one theme team to watch not just for Season 1 but well beyond.

Key cards: 95 Captains Clayton Kershaw, 99 Hall of Fame Larry Walker, 97 Topps Now Charlie Blackmon, 97 Prime Kyle Seager

Strengths: You will make right-handed pitchers cry

Weaknesses: Left-handed pitchers will make you cry

Top tip: The H/9 boost is only so helpful in online play, so sneaking in players who bat lefty but actually throw righty – or the very few hitters who do the reverse – is a means of cheating the spirit of the Captains boost but optimizing it.

The Far East Movement: The Asian-Born Theme Team

Probably the oddest of the Season 1 Captains released in late April was the Seiya Suzuki that bore the Asian-Born Players tag. While it is a cool way to pay homage to the strong and growing legacy of Asian-born players coming to MLB and dominating, the pool of Asian-born players in MLB The Show is not particularly deep, and notable omissions from the Legends pool like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideo Nomo limit its ceiling.

But Sony San Diego surely took that into account when making the boost that Suzuki provides very easy to maximize and massive when activated, with just seven players allowing for +20 boosts to Contact and Power against righties, +20 BB/9, and +15 H/9.

And conveniently, these boosts are enormous for the greatest Asian-born player currently plying his trade in Major League Baseball, with the Live Series Shohei Ohtani capable of maxing out his Contact and Power against righties and his H/9 through Suzuki’s boosts combined with others – most notably, either the aforementioned Kershaw boosts for lefties that Ohtani qualifies for as a lefty hitter and enjoys as a right-handed pitcher or the Kodai Senga Cornerstone Captain boosts for pitchers with sub-65 BB/9.

Between Suzuki and Senga alone, that’s also two of the six non-Ohtani Asian-born players needed to get to Suzuki’s Tier 3 boost. Free versions of Shota Imanaga, Kenta Maeda, Jung Ho Lee, Ha-Seong Kim, and Ohtani all exist, too, meaning that players can theoretically have this Captains boost for no more than sweat, so long as they pick Suzuki over Santana, Kershaw, and the others in the Season 1 Captains pack that is part of the Season 1 Recap program’s reward path.

The question about how meta-viable this theme team is, though, largely relies on how many cards of Asian-born players are released in Season 2 and beyond, as even the Senga Cornerstone Captain is a Season 1 card that will need a Wild Card slot to be used in Season 2 and beyond. Is it worth dedicating seven roster slots – which could fairly easily be allocated to little-used reserves – almost exclusively to boost an Ohtani or help out Imanaga?

Key cards: 95 Captains Seiya Suzuki, 94 Live Series Shohei Ohtani

Strengths: If you want the best version of Ohtani possible in Diamond Dynasty at the moment, this is a necessity

Weaknesses: If Ha-Seong Kim is a hitter in your lineup, you are definitely sacrificing something

Top tip: The best hybrid theme teams here are probably the Cubs, thanks to not just Suzuki and Imanaga but a Yu Darvish pitching Captain, or the Dodgers, who have Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

I Love LA: The Los Angeles Dodgers Theme Team

If the Yankees have the richest history in American baseball, the seemingly richest team in MLB at the moment – the Los Angeles Dodgers – is the prime candidate to be No. 2 in that category.

And it plays out in Diamond Dynasty, where Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Clayton Kershaw can play alongside Fernando Valenzuela, Gary Sheffield, and Eric Gagne on a superteam spanning eras.

But if the Yankees and Braves have enviable Legends player pools in DD, the Dodgers have a surprisingly shallow one. Sandy Koufax has been conspicuously absent for years, as has Roy Campanella; Pee Wee Reese has not been part of DD for a few years. And the versions of Jackie Robinson that show up in The Show are fine tributes to the man and his greatness as a player, but his profile as a very good but not elite contact hitter without great power makes it difficult to fit him on god squads.

So why are the Dodgers here? Well, you may have heard that Shohei Ohtani is good. Clayton Kershaw is also good. Mookie Betts is, too. So is Freddie Freeman. So is Will Smith. So is Sheffield, so is Cody Bellinger, so is Kenley Jansen, so is Gagne. Even without some of the greats of franchise history, the spine of the Dodgers theme team is steely, and promises to get even better with better versions of Ohtani and Kershaw, among others, on the way.

The Dodgers also have the unique advantage of having two superb Core cards in their mix, in the form of a Mike Piazza available from the Live Series collection and an Adrian Beltre card from the pre-order exclusive – for now – Legends choice pack that both fit in just fine on a late-Season 1 theme team but will be newly elite as Season 2 dawns. Add the Live Series Ohtani and Betts – and Freeman, and Kershaw, and Tyler Glasnow, and Captains Joc Pederson and Joe Kelly – and the Dodgers’ core of Core cards is a cut above basically every other MLB team except perhaps the Yankees, making assembling a roster of former Brooklyn boys and Chavez Ravine mainstays a fine way in May to get an early leg up in June.

Of course, much of that relies on how much you’re willing to invest in Ohtani and Betts as Live Series cards, a pricey prospect with their combined cost nearer to 300,000 than 200,000 Stubs. But buying them now and being able to sell them for next to no loss – or even profit – should Core cards rise in value as Season 1 cards rotate out seems possible.

Key cards: 94 Live Series Shohei Ohtani, 99 Season Awards Mookie Betts or 91 Live Series Mookie Betts, 95 Captains Clayton Kershaw

Strengths: Elite top-end players, likely viability in Season 2

Weaknesses: Dearth of great Legends unlikely to be aided greatly by better versions of players like Duke Snider and Beltre

Top tip: While the Dodgers have a lot of excellent hitters, they do trend toward Contact rather than Power. Learning how to slug with the lower-Contact, lower-Vision versions of Max Muncy that plug in well on Dodgers squads helps offset that bias.

Northside on the Rise: The Chicago Cubs Theme Team

The Cubs have a reputation as lovable losers that has stuck around even with their breakthrough to win the 2016 World Series as part of a period of perennial contention. And their teardown and rebuild was thought likely to produce another such period in real life in the coming years. But the 2024 Cubs are a bit ahead of schedule – and that’s helped make the Cubs a viable theme team in Diamond Dynasty.

To be clear, this has a lot to do with Cubs performances meriting special cards in Season 1. Shota Imagana almost immediately establishing himself as a Cy Young candidate has yielded two cards for him in less than two months of his MLB career, while five Cubs have Pipeline cards at or above 91, a testament to their farm system maturing at a propitious moment. But Sony San Diego has also given Cubs of recent vintage considerable love, with Kris Bryant, returning Legend Jake Arrieta, and Nick Castellanos all getting excellent cards, and the contingent of Cubs Legends in DD has been well-represented, with the 99 Kerry Wood having an argument for being the mode’s best pitcher and versions of Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, Sammy Sosa, and Billy Williams all backfilling the roster.

The issue is that this might be as good as it gets for the Cubbies. Their best Core cards are Captains Yu Darvish and Kyle Schwarber, and there’s only one Live Series Diamond on the roster – a Cody Bellinger who will need to play well in reality to merit a better card as a Cub than the time-honored Lightning card from his days as a Dodger. Bringing along all of the Cubs’ Season 1 roster is impossible, and bringing along the best of the best will be an expensive prospect, with Wood and Imanaga being the only two of the Cubs’ 10 best cards by overall rating to have been freely obtainable.

Elite versions of Banks, Sandberg, and especially Sosa – who has been done a little dirty over his Diamond Dynasty existence, and deserves a card as tremendous as he was at his absolute best – could change the calculus going forward, but the Cubs might just be having their season in the sun as an elite theme team right now. If so, Cubs fans might want to make the most of it.

Key cards: 99 Team Affinity/Hyper Kerry Wood, 99 Season Awards Shota Imanaga, 99 Awards Kris Bryant, 99 Hyper Jake Arrieta

Strengths: Depth and breadth of talent

Weaknesses: Costly to build, potential to age poorly

Top tip: As previously mentioned, the hybrid potential for an Asian-born/Cubs theme team is excellent, with Suzuki and Darvish being hitting and pitching Captains, respectively. A shame that Kosuke Fukudome isn’t in the game!

The Cornerstone Keystone: The Byron Buxton Low-Vision Theme Team

If there is ever a time when a demonstration is needed to show that Power rules much of MLB The Show, the two months that a Byron Buxton card providing Power in exchange for using hitters with low Vision will be the best one.

Buxton’s Cornerstone Captain was elevated to rarefied air early on in Season 1, and it’s remained a viable build-enabling card for essentially the entire span of it, with players still plugging in sluggers who could use LASIK but hit lasers and reaping the remarkable rewards – +15 Power against righties and lefties, and +10 Speed and Fielding just for fun – of putting together a team full of them. 

Even though there aren’t many top-end players at this point in Season 1 with the sub-60 Vision needed to activate Buxton’s boosts, the swath of players who have been eligible for it has included such stalwarts as Lightning Cody Bellinger, Pipeline Jasson Dominguez, Standout Mike Napoli, Live Series Aaron Judge and Mike Trout, Spring Breakout Dylan Crews, and All-Star Giancarlo Stanton. That’s a Who’s Who of some of the most feared and most popular sluggers in Diamond Dynasty, and of cards that players might have gravitated to regardless of an enormous boost to their Power.

But with Buxton in the lineup, players got their cards and a boost, too – to the point that “Buxton boost” was on the community’s lips and fingertips for weeks and that the 99 Buxton released in the Season 1 Recap program on Thursday feels like an inside joke by Sony San Diego that isn’t all that funny.

The scaling of the power curve to yield fewer and fewer low-Vision players has been a soft nerf for Buxton’s boosts, and Season 2 and beyond should render this build less and less viable. It would, however, be an unforgivable omission not to include it in any accounting of Season 1.

Key cards: 88 Cornerstone Captains Byron Buxton, a bunch of dudes who squint to hit tanks

Strengths: Boosts sluggers’ Power, low Vision can be compensated for with player skill

Weaknesses: Probably was not the best idea to have one Captain so comprehensively shape the metagame, in retrospect

Top tip: Underdiscussed in the discourse about the Buxton boost was that it only required 11 hitters for a Tier 3 boost – so throwing whatever horribly myopic Commons or Bronzes fit the bill on a bench to get more than a third of the full boost conditions met has been easy all this time.