How to Prepare for Season 2 in Diamond Dynasty

The impending release of Season 2 in MLB The Show’s Diamond Dynasty mode should bring a lot of excitement to the player base, as it represents both the arrival of a ton of new content and a chance to start over – or for the first time – and experience a new metagame. But it also means the end of Season 1 is near, and that there is much to do in the next week before the June 6 release date of Season 2 to maximize what is available at present.

Here’s a rundown of what Diamond Dynasty players should consider and do in the next week before Season 1 ends.

Decide What Matters

While most of the rest of the tips here are practical and specific, this one is more mental and general: Figure out what you find important enough to do before Season 1 ends – and focus on that thing or those goals.

This may seem obvious, but one of the best and worst aspects of any team-building mode like Diamond Dynasty with a slew of objectives, programs, and modes within it is that there is a great chance to get lost in or overwhelmed by the breadth of choices available. Players can invest time and effort in Ranked Seasons, Conquest, Mini Seasons, Events, Battle Royale, Moments, Collections, Programs – to include the Season 1 XP reward path – and even March to October and Storylines, modes that exist outside of Diamond Dynasty, in pursuit of rewards with the mode.

Just because you can does not mean you should, however. If you want to obtain the Pedro Martinez or Willie Mays that are available in the Season 1 reward path and collection, respectively, maximizing your XP earned over the next seven days or the number of Season 1 cards you can nab might be paramount to you – and that probably means you should stay away from certain elements of DD. Likewise, if building the best theme team possible to better prepare for Season 2 is the thing that will make you most happy in The Show, you might not want to prioritize getting Season 1 XP but instead progress in the Team Affinity programs.

Being honest with yourself about where you are in Season 1, what you want from it at this point, and – maybe most importantly – just how much time and effort you can or want to devote to Diamond Dynasty in a week is crucial to making the most of that week. That should help you figure out where you want to focus your efforts.

Prioritize Expiring Content

That said: There is content within Season 1 that is explicitly expiring and that may not be available beyond June 7, and then there is content that should be available within Season 2, if perhaps less exciting or relevant. You should probably focus on the former.

The most important of these expiring elements is the Season 1 XP reward path because of its key rewards: The three 99 overall Season 1 Bosses, which include Martinez, and Jimmy Rollins. Not only are these among the best cards in the game – especially the switch-hitting Rollins that seems poised to be a fixture on the switch-hitting theme team. a Phillies theme team that is poised to be potent if the real-life Phillies’ excellent play yields great in-game cards, and most god squads – they are quite possibly going to be inaccessible to players in Season 2 or beyond. The history of Bosses tied to programs like Season 1 – think of previous iterations’ Innings programs – suggests that those players really are designed by Sony San Diego to largely be time-limited rewards, and may only become available again much later in the year.

That puts a premium on the work necessary to get Season 1 XP, though this weekend’s double XP helps a bit.

Fortunately, apart from that reward path, there isn’t much that is clearly labeled as expiring on June 7 in game. The Moonshot Event is set to end on June 7 at 2 p.m. Eastern, and the third Ranked season and program within Season 1 and Battle Royale 3 program are both set to end at 3 p.m. Eastern – when Season 2 should release in full – but the only content outside of those that has a labeled expiration date is the Legends & Live Series campaign within Mini Seasons, which has a “challenge expires at 2:59 p.m. Eastern June 7” note that suggests that either the entire season will expire or at least that the 95 OVR Takashi Series Bob Feller that exists as a reward for winning the championship within it will no longer be available.

With every other program otherwise without expiration dates, it is very much possible that they will all be available in Season 2 – including the sprawling Season 1 Awards and Team Affinity programs. But without explicit communication from Sony San Diego, it’s also possible that those programs and rewards, or some subset of them, will vanish without prior warning.

Players should probably consider that while devising their grinds, and should certainly get to where they want to be in regards to content that has an explicit expiration date first.

Access XP Expertly

The official developer blog for Season 2 in Diamond Dynasty makes it abundantly clear that the Season 1 XP reward path was too long and not rewarding enough: “Progress faster in the Season 2 XP Reward Path & earn S2 XP Bosses earlier” is the first bullet point in the list near the top of it, “the XP Reward Path will provide much quicker progress with more XP to be found throughout the different Diamond Dynasty modes” is an explicit promise further down, and “It is our goal to improve pacing in the XP Reward Path in Season 2, and for players to have an easier time unlocking rewards in the XP Reward Path than they did in Season 1” is also included.

But that doesn’t help players who want to earn Season 1 XP now, and so those players will have to keep grinding. Maybe the best ways to do that? Mini Seasons and program completion.

The clear top option for gleaning this XP from a program is the just-released Lou Gehrig Day program, which holds a titanic 80,000 XP in its short and simple Yankees-centric reward path. That should really be your first order of business this weekend.

The Legends & Live Series Mini Season holds 60,000 Season 1 XP for full completion – and its tasks can be completed on Rookie. You’ll need to play a minimum of 34 three-inning games to get that, but you can also double-dip on XP from other programs – like Team Affinity, which will supply many of the Legends needed to compete in that Mini Season in the first place – while grinding through it.

Each Team Affinity Chapter 3 reward path has a less impressive 4,000 Season 1 XP – but, again, that’s a bonus on top of other gameplay and program XP. And the TA Chapter 2 paths have 3,250 XP, while the Chapter 1 ones have 4,000. Get all of Team Affinity done and dusted, and you can obtain 67,500 XP from just those programs.

Each Season 1 Awards drop has a reward path with 20,000 XP. There are 10 of those, so that’s 200,000 Season 1 XP.

The Season 1 Recap program has 40,000 XP, too – and its objectives are so easy to complete that players probably don’t need to tailor their teams to those objectives much if at all to score that haul.

If you have already mined those programs, it is admittedly much harder to extract XP from Season 1. The available Conquest maps are fairly stingy, with the Apple Map that requires conquering just eight strongholds holding 4,000 XP but the Nation of Baseball Map that requires conquering 30 paying out just 10,000 XP for full completion. Showdowns do not grant Season 1 XP outside of gameplay XP. Ranked, Battle Royale, and Events each have significant XP chunks available, but obviously require a bit more skill – and patience for or with other people – than offline play, and also tie your rate of XP accrual to your capacity to collect wins.

Being good and brave enough to try nabbing wins and the attendant XP online is a way to ramp up your rewards. Apart from that, though, you might want to get comfortable in Mini Seasons.

Work the Core

While most of this rundown has focused on finishing Season 1 tasks for the purpose of obtaining rewards from Season 1, the players who are going to play Season 2 might be better suited by obtaining rewards for Season 2. And, well, core to that is acquiring Core players.

Core players are designated as such by Sony San Diego because they are meant to be used in all of the Seasons planned for the full content cycle of the game, while Season 1 or Season 2 cards will be limited to their window of release. The Season 1 Bosses – Rollins, Andy Pettitte, and Larry Walker – are awesome cards, but they are all Season 1 cards; they will need Wild Card slots, which will be limited and must be earned, to be included in Season 2 teams. The Babe Ruth, Pedro Martinez, and Rafael Palmeiro that are Live Series collection rewards – along with all of the 30 Live Series collection rewards for each team, and the six for each division – are Core cards, which can be included on whatever team whenever desired.

Given this, it might make sense for players to cut bait on obtaining those best Season 1 cards and channel their energies into building as broad a collection of Core cards as possible, laying the foundation for early success in Season 2. Heading to the My MLB Players section of My Inventory under the Collect tab in game will help with that, but so will searching for the same thing on the website you’re currently on ( https://www.showdd.io/24/sets/core )

Be Smart, Head Start

Of course, the absolute best thing that players can do to get ahead in Season 2 is by doing exactly what Sony San Diego has presented as the best thing for that: Completing the five tasks in Season 1 programs that comprise the Season 2 Head Start checklist.

Those tasks are, from the dev blog:

• Completing The Show Classics Program 

• Completing the Season 1 Recap Program 

• Completing the Egg Hunt Program 

• Unlocking Season Awards Mookie Betts through the Season Awards Program Collection 

• Collecting 250 Season 1 cards in the Season 1 Collection for CC Sabathia

Of these, four are fairly simple and the last is a grind. 

All of the first three programs have fairly straightforward or simple goals – the Egg Hunt program is more simple than straightforward, and it helps to know what the hints point to ( https://www.showdd.io/24/programs/egg-hunt )  – and unlocking the Season Awards Betts requires completing at least eight of the 10 Season Awards drop programs, which is a little more tendentious but does have a logic to it.

Piling up 250 Season 1 cards to pull CC out of the Season 1 Collection, by contrast, is arduous and complicated. – and costly, too Adding up just the Season 1 Awards, Team Affinity, and Topps Now cards that are mostly free to unlock does not even get players to 200 Season 1 cards; most of the Season 1 cards available on the market cost thousands of Stubs.

While the rewards for fully completing that suite of tasks are likely to be substantial – the blog’s phrasing is “if you complete all five of them together, you will earn enough progress to unlock the first 10 levels of the Season 2 XP Reward path, including your first Wild Card slot!” and also mentions individual rewards for each task – the last of them is the most of them, and it will require a lot more than the first four. Take that into account.

Theme a Team

The most news-worthy bit of that dev blog, outside of its revelations about Season XP being tweaked and a 99 Hall of Fame Ken Griffey Jr. being one of the Season 2 Bosses, is a rough outline of Team Affinity’s first Chapter in Season 2:

“Only in-Season player items (Season 2, Core) can be used in Team Affinity Season 2 Chapters for program progress. In other words, Season 2 and Core cards will be eligible in all three Season 2 Chapters, but Season 1 cards cannot be used for Season 2 TA Chapters. Additionally, the first Team Affinity (Season 2: Chapter 1) will take less time to complete than our last drop (Season 1: Chapter 3) with more repeatable missions.”

So those 99 Eduardo Escobar or Tom Glavine cards won’t be compiling Team Affinity program progress in Season 2 – but Live Series and other Core cards will.

That means that if you’ve got, say, a Royals theme team ready to go for Season 2, and can bang out hits with Bobby Witt Jr., swat homers with Salvador Perez, and score strikeouts with Seth Lugo, you will probably be able to make a ton of early progress in Team Affinity in Season 2. It might behoove you, then, to take the 10 minutes to put together your preferred team of Core cards now instead of having to prune Season 1 studs from such a team in the early days of Season 2, especially if you’re keen to keep up with the Joneses and grinders when it drops.