Breakdown: MLB The Show 25 Diamond Dynasty's Changes and Improvements

We have reached something close to peak hype for MLB The Show 25, with just weeks to go before its March 18 launch – and only 10 days until its March 14 early access date – and Tuesday’s release of a Fielding Feedback episode about Diamond Dynasty from developer Sony San Diego – one that explains more about the changes for this year’s edition of card-collecting team-building mode than the welcome “Sets and Seasons are no more!” messaging that remains manna from heaven but dates to last fall.

So what else is new in Diamond Dynasty for MLB The Show 25? Let’s break it down.

Sets and Seasons Gone, Full-Year Progression is Back

Again, it’s been well-known that the little-liked Sets and Seasons progression system, which allowed players to earn more 99 OVR cards earlier in the game cycle but then locked them away after a given time, has been scrapped for MLB The Show 25. But reading the words “every card stays eligible all season long in Diamond Dynasty” is still a relief, as it probably counts as a last shovel’s worth of dirt on the idea that players would someday warm to the idea of having their progression effectively nulled and their collections effectively zeroed out on a regular basis.

Robert Flores does say in the video that “your rewards’ OVR rating will power creep as the season progresses,” suggesting that there will once more be a build to 99 OVR, but there’s no verbal mention of the usual 95 and 99 OVR collection rewards available for completion of the Live Series collections. It would be a shock to see those removed from Diamond Dynasty, so it’s fair to expect that information on them is merely being held back for now.

Diamond Quest: A Roguelike Legacy

Apart from the structural change of a seasonless game, the marquee feature for Diamond Dynasty in The Show 25 seems likely to be Diamond Quest, which is a roguelike single-player mode in which players will build teams and obtain power-ups over the course of “runs” on a game board with “fast-paced challenges, iconic moments, and three-inning games.”

At a blush, that’s a riff on Diamond Dynasty’s long-running, map-based, and Risk-like Conquest mode, with the roguelike elements being (theoretically) different teams and the power-ups available each run. The video explains that players will earn a Peanuts currency in Diamond Quest “by making spectacular plays” and spend it at a store run by Coach, The Show’s series mascot, for the perks that will be familiar to anyone who has played Road to the Show or Showdowns in iterations past. And the video also promises “top-tier rewards” for playing on higher difficulties and suggests that there are Stadiums that may function like mini-bosses or the Strongholds in Conquest.

While Diamond Quest represents a potential way to keep things fresh as the season progresses in Diamond Dynasty – and a broader shift toward roguelike and board game-style elements in team-building modes that comes on the heels of NBA 2K25 repackaging much of its single-player content in MyTEAM in the Breakout mode – its viability as a season-long attraction is likely going to come down to the rewards available. Without that hook, how many players are going to invest time in it by their 10th or 15th run? 

Revised Rewards Progressions: A Mixed Bag?

And speaking of rewards: The change that players might feel most sharply in Diamond Dynasty this year could actually come from the revamp of the various rewards progressions, as it seems possible if not likely that things will be stingier than ever.

The Fielding Feedback video makes clear that Team Affinity will – at least for the My Journey program it features – once again be broken out into individual programs for all 30 MLB teams, which reverses repeated condensations into divisions that made Team Affinity much less of a grind in years past. And while that recent history makes it seem possible that Sony San Diego could tweak this again, the video has Flores saying team-specific rewards are coming “all year long” – which, if it means performing tasks for each of 30 individual teams over and over again through sub-programs, screenshots of My Journey XP paths having an “On the Rise” designation hinting at such a structure, is bound to get old for completionist very quickly.

And then there’s the consolidation that is arguably a solution in search of a problem. 

Spotlight programs, which drop weekly and monthly, seem likely to absorb older reality-reflecting programs like Topps Now and Weekly/Monthly Awards into one unified progression path, which could well both cut down on some of the chaff in those programs and make the wheat a little harder to find. Even if “Lightning-level” rewards are on offer in these programs, condensing these rewards would seem to threaten the time-honored tradition of players of each month in the MLB season getting “Lightning” cards to pay tribute to their scalding streaks – and that would bring some pushback from the community. 

Multiplayer rewards, usually tied to multiple parallel XP paths for modes like Ranked and Battle Royale, are now part of one program covering those two modes and Events. While the promise and premise there is that you can “play your way” to earn rewards, making all of the modes feed into one progression might help stealthily reduce the total rewards available, and will likely have the side effect of turning each mode slightly more competitive – not that that was an issue in the hyper-competitive Battle Royale.

Weekend Classic Mode Offers High-Level Head-to-Head

But while flattening and streamlining multiplayer rewards could benefit casual players who might be able to farm progression in Events, the hardcore H2H demons are getting their own playground in the form of Weekend Classic mode. This will run for “about four days” – presumably a Thursday through Sunday or Friday through Monday timetable, given the whole “Weekend” part – at the end of each Ranked Season, is open to all players, and appears to have a ratings-fueled ranking system and a dedicated reward path for winning up to six games.

The top reward on that path shown for the lowest division in the video is a Headliners pack and 2,000 Stubs for six wins, which isn’t particularly appealing to your author and his H2H-averse sensibilities, but the cumulative rewards for six wins are three The Show packs, two Ballin’ is a Habit packs, and 5,000 Stubs – not awful for an afternoon or evening’s grind, in all likelihood.

However: There are also rewards for rankings within a given division, and there is also a shot of rewards for an “Immortal” division that seems to be qualified for by achieving a Ranked rating of at least 1,000, with the first-place finisher there earning a whopping 25 Ballin’ is a Habit packs.

Diamond Dynasty has lacked a true best-of-the-best H2H mode until now, and it’s been a glaring omission compared to virtually every other team-building mode. Weekend Classic might not be an every-weekend mode to rival all those others, but it’s a start – and promises to be a bloodbath at the highest levels.

The Cosmetic Changes

Finally, there are some cosmetic touches that will probably be welcomed for a week or two and forgotten by May. Each Diamond Dynasty sub-mode is going to have a specific presentation package of graphics and so forth to make clear what sort of game players are currently in, milestones achieved by cards within DD will get on-screen graphics to call out those feats, and Storylines – returning with a third chapter of Negro Leagues history – will have its own presentation and special commentary from Jon Sciambi and Chris Singleton.

All of this stuff generally contributes to the immersion of the game, but when and where it slows down the daily player – as Mini-Seasons presentation has in recent iterations – it can be an annoyance rather than an asset.