99 OVR Victor Martinez Tops Latest Major Diamond Dynasty Collection

99 OVR Víctor Martinez is New Legends and Flashbacks Collection Reward

Joining fellow former Tigers star Miguel Cabrera as a 99 OVR menace requiring hours and hours of sweat and millions upon millions of Stubs is Víctor Martinez, whose Silver Slugger seasons are honored on an Awards Series card rewarded for completing dozens of in-game Collections in Diamond Dynasty.

This V-Mart card is, like Miggy before him, unequivocally one of the best hitters that will appear in MLB The Show 26, with every attribute that contributes to Contact and Power in triple digits on his base card and the ability to get all of those stats to a minimum of 110 via Parallel Mods and Captain boosts. To say this card is a monster would be understating things — and while his primary position is first base, his secondary position being catcher means he will assuredly slide in there in most lineups as the king of a large subset of switch-hitting backstops.

The Series with corresponding Collections that contribute to the Martinez Legends and Flashbacks Collection are as follows, and require the following to be completed, in descending order of cards required:

• World Baseball Classic: 142 cards to unlock World Baseball Classic Maikel Garcia
• Spotlight: 70 cards to unlock voucher
• Topps Now: 63 cards to unlock voucher
• All-Star: 45 cards to unlock voucher
• Awards: 32 cards to unlock voucher
• The Negro Leagues: 31 cards to unlock voucher
• Cityscapes: 30 cards to unlock Cityscapes Mickey Mantle
• Jolt: 40 cards to unlock voucher
• Mural: 29 collected cards to unlock Mural Jose Ramirez
• Vintage: 27 collected cards to unlock Vintage Ketel Marte
• New Threads: 23 collected cards to unlock New Threads Bo Bichette
• Contributor: 19 cards to unlock voucher
• Breakout: 18 cards to unlock voucher
• 2nd Half Heroes: 18 cards to unlock voucher
• Egg Hunt: 17 cards to unlock voucher
• Spring Breakout: 16 collected cards to unlock Spring Breakout Konnor Griffin
• Postseason: 12 cards to unlock voucher
• Veteran: 12 cards to unlock voucher
• Milestone: Nine cards to unlock voucher
• Standout: Eight cards to unlock voucher
• St. Patrick's Day: Eight cards to unlock voucher
• Rookie: Seven cards to unlock voucher
• Cornerstone: Four cards to unlock voucher
• Last Ride: Two cards to unlock voucher
• Prime: Two cards to unlock voucher
• Signature: One card to unlock voucher

Players will need 24 total vouchers and lockable players available from those Collections.

Once more, conspiciously absent from the Collections necessary for the endgame card here is the Jackie Robinson Day Collection, whose Jackie Robinson card does not have a slot in either Legends and Flashback Collection.

And once again, the hundreds of — it's closer to a thousand, in honesty — of cards needed to complete these Collections represent millions of Stubs essentially burned by turning sellable cards into unsellable ones, with dozens more hours needed to be poured into Diamond Dynasty to obtain unsellable cards that are also unbuyable — most notably, again, the Jolt Series cards that require deep engagement with Team Affinity. This Martinez is an even better card than either Cabrera that was part of the previous Collection, but it's certainly also an even bigger lift, even if much of the "progress" will "carry over" in a limited sense.

A bit of good news for those attempting to obtain V-Mart tout de suite: The new Pack Palooza Program will help in that regard by rewarding seven Packs, most from previously released Programs — including the coveted St. Patrick's Day and Easter Series cards that have ballooned in price since their release. The seventh and final Pack on its XP reward path, the titular Pack Palooza Pack, is a choice Pack from which players can nab one unsellable Rare-tier player from a slew of previous Programs, sadly excluding the St. Patrick's Day cards. That Program's requirements for completion are also an easy background grind: The most onerous of the Missions, which fully complete the XP reward path without any Moments to go with them, is hitting 20 home runs, and the three Extreme-labeled Moments that would provide full completion a bit more swiftly are all on All-Star difficulty.

Oh, and just as there was a hint in the Jolt Series voucher track for this Collection, there's another one now: The next Legends and Flashbacks Collection is scheduled for July 26th.

MLB The Show Bans Players for WBC Mini Seasons Exploit

Maybe the most significant happening for the MLB The Show community this week, however, came on Thursday, when San Diego Studio announced on Twitter that it was "taking action against a number of accounts that violated our Terms of Service by participating in an exploit within the WBC Mini Seasons activity."

The exploit allowed players to accumulate Packs — in some cases, into the hundreds and thousands — without actually earning them through gameplay, and likely allowed a significant number of players to accumulate Stubs well into the millions, rendering obtaining many of the best cards available in Diamond Dynasty or completing the pricey Live Series or other Collections trivial.

But despite this obviously risky behavior — which few have tried to justify as being permissible, much less moral, as repeated abuse of a known exploit clearly violates the Terms of Service all Diamond Dynasty players must agree to — being potentially disastrously distortionate for the Diamond Dynasty marketplace and disadvantaging players who did not know of or did not participate in this exploit, the announcement drew much blowback from the community. Especially on Twitter, prominent creators and average players alike pushed back against the action by complaining about various unrelated issues with this year's iteration of DD or, worse, resorting to ad hominem and repugnant attacks on SDS employees.

We'll have more opinion on this move this weekend, but this much seems incontrovertible: The action itself being inarguably necessary and yet also both rejected as such and widely lamented reveals just how precarious a position SDS is currently in with community sentiment.

Roster Update Mints Six New Diamonds, Red Diamond Ohtani

The second attributes-centric roster update of Live Series cards in Diamond Dynasty was implemented this Friday, and brings with its six new Diamonds. Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski is the obvious biggest name, but Yankees teammates Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler and Cubs spark plug Pete Crow-Armstrong are close behind, with professional hitter Yandy Diaz of the Rays and Shea Langeliers of the A's being the lesser names on the list. (The +4 to Phillies ace Cristopher Sanchez is also notable, though it moves him from 85 OVR to 89 OVR.)

But the real headline has to be the adjustment of Shohei Ohtani up one OVR to 95, crowning him as the first Live Series Red Diamond in DD history after significant boosts to his hitting stats that reflect him heating up after a slower start to 2026. With his pitching performances putting him squarely in Cy Young consideration and his candidacy for National League MVP probably ending up more coronation than competition, it's not hard to argue that Ohtani is as good right now as any Live Series player has been in MLB The Show, but the Red Diamond treatment for 95+ OVR cards not existing prior to MLB The Show 26 means that he, and not former teammate Mike Trout, gets this particular distinction, some snazzy card art, and the price jump from around 750,000 Stubs to more than 900,000 to go with it.

Attributes-based roster updates do also include downgrades, and this one has a few notable nerfs: Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh has had five points clawed back from each of his Contact and Power stats, which seems fair for a .161 batting average and just seven home runs after his all-time power season in 2025; Vladimir Guerrero Jr. finds himself at 85 OVR, down from 88, after losing attributes in every hitting category save Vision; and former cover athletes Gunnar Henderson and Fernando Tatis Jr. join big-ticket offseason acquisition Kyle Tucker, fellow Dodgers underperformer Will Smith, the scuffling Trea Turner, and a now underrated Seiya Suzuki in falling from the ranks of the Diamonds to mere Golds.

June Spotlight Drop 1 Yields Red Diamond Jackson Chourio, Roki Sasaki

Relegated to an afterthought today, the first Spotlight Drop for June is still headlined by two big names of rising MLB stars in Jackson Chourio and Roki Sasaki.

The latter is a 95 OVR Red Diamond at the end of the XP reward path, and a starter — a bummer for anyone who loved his nearly peerless reliever cards from the Dodgers' World Series run a year ago — with a vicious fastball-slider combo but fairly unimpressive attributes relative to the rest of the available starters in DD.

And while the former is clearly the more well-rounded of the two 96 OVR players in the Rare round of the Spotlight Drop 1 Pack, as an outfielder who can run, hit, and field, though his power leaves a bit to be desired, Chourio is not nearly the hitter the Isaac Paredes that joins him is on paper. After swatting his 100th career home run, this is a power-packed Paredes — 105/95 against righties and lefties — that outclasses his usual contact-only builds, and his secondary eligibility at second base makes him maybe the best slugger at that position in the game, though his defense will be subpar.

The rest of the Topps Now players that fill out Drop 1 do not appear to be all that great at first blush, though Reds second baseman Edwin Arroyo getting a 93 OVR card with a lot of green on it and the all-important ability to switch-hit makes him an intriguing free option at second base.

Other News and Notes

• A new Max Scherzer-centric Showdown arrived earlier this week to celebrate Scherzer reaching 3,500 career strikeouts with a 96 OVR Blue Jays-flavored Scherzer as a reward. It's not particularly difficult.
• A new Freddie Freeman Program celebrating his 2,500th hit also came to DD earlier this week; it's even easier than the Scherzer Showdown, as tallying hits and runs in the background will complete Missions rewarding 80 percent of its XP reward path and a bonus Mission that requires the emblem for reaching 1,500 lifetime hits in DD will more than complete the rest of it.