Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1: Best Out of Position Cards, How to Unlock Them

Switching it up a la D2: The Mighty Ducks has been difficult for Sony San Diego to do in Diamond Dynasty this season. Sticking with its two-year-old – and largely unpopular – Seasons model for DD has made MLB The Show’s card-collecting mode one of unwelcome resets that restrict players’ ability to build their dream teams.

But Team Affinity’s first release in Season 3 featuring out of position players might be the remedy that has been sought for months – or, at least, a reprieve.

Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1 Structure

The architecture of Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1 is not dramatically different from the six Team Affinity releases from Season 1 and 2. There are still six distinct sub-programs and six individual reward paths for each of MLB’s six divisions, and players will still need to obtain 200,000 Team Affinity XP to complete each one.

But the two major changes are welcome ones. 

First, players can now use any players from a division to make progress on the TAS3C1 reward paths, instead of being limited to Season 1- and Season 2-eligible players, making it much easier to build a full team of great players to make earning Parallel XP or tallying stats much easier.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, each team now has individual missions that reward massive amounts of Team Affinity XP for completion, making it much, much easier to build an actual single-squad theme team of Blue Jays, Braves, or Brewers and blaze through the accrual of the stats needed to earn reward path progress.

Those tasks, completable in any Diamond Dynasty modes, are as follows:

• 15 RBI with one team’s players: 10,000 Team Affinity XP (repeatable)

• 50 total bases with one team’s players: 25,000 Team Affinity XP

• 50 strikeouts with one team’s players: 50,000 Team Affinity XP

• 100 hits with one team’s players: 75,000 Team Affinity XP

One completion of each of those generates a whopping 160,000 Team Affinity XP, enough to get three of the five TAS3C1 95 OVR Out of Position bosses – and it would be a feat to complete the non-repeatable missions and not end up racking up 30 RBI with one team’s players, making a total of 170,000 or 180,000 Team Affinity XP in a given reward path far more likely. Add in the 15,000 TA XP available for each boss’s individual stat missions – 10 Ks for the pitchers, five hits for the hitters – and it’s quite clear that Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1 is designed to at least make building theme teams for individual teams the optimal means of grinding.

Each TAS3C1  reward path contains a total of 3,500 Stubs, 15,000 Season 3 XP, nine The Show packs, two Ballin’ is a Habit packs, two random Headliners packs, five packs each containing a choice of one of the five 95 OVR Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1 bosses in each division, and – in another welcome change – one pack containing various cosmetic items rather than a series of choice packs making obtaining those cosmetics a needlessly tedious chore. Over the six paths, that adds up to 21,000 Stubs, 90,000 Season 2 XP, 54 Show packs, 12 Ballin’ is a Habit packs, and 12 Headliners packs. 

The bump in Season 3 XP is quite nice: Completing just each Chapter 1 reward path of Team Affinity now earns more than a quarter of the 350,000 Season 3 XP necessary to unlock the 99 OVR Hall of Fame Hank Aaron at the end of the Season 3 XP Reward Path 1.

How to Grind Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1

As mentioned above, the best way to grind through TAS3C1 will definitely be building single-team theme teams and tallying the stats to complete those missions with huge XP rewards. But that maybe shouldn’t be your first task, except in that it can overlap with others.

Why? Well, there are still Moments, Showdowns, and – especially – a Conquest map that reward substantial tallies of TAS3C1 XP, and they might be keys to unlocking bosses that make grinding easier.

The Moments and Showdowns are the quicker means of earning smaller chunks of XP this go around: Each division has five simple Moments, one with each boss, and each of those Moments rewards 3,000 TA XP for completion; the Showdowns are one per combined AL/NL division, require beating just two individual stages – albeit ones that require overcoming nine- and 10-run deficits – to clear, and award 15,000 XP in each of those two divisions’ reward paths.

And the primary benefit of facing Out of Position pitchers whose control isn’t the best and having more than a full game’s worth of outs to work with – 30 for the first matchup, 35 for the final – means that you can very probably just set down your controller, let those pitchers gas themselves out against batters who aren’t even swinging, and then tee off on fatigued hurlers if you want.

But the Conquest map is a reskin of the annual staple that is the Nation of Baseball map, shuffling the locations of teams so that traveling west to Coors Field isn’t the obvious starting point, and completing it grants a staggering 125,000 Team Affinity XP for each division, which is at once kind of commensurate with completing a Conquest map with 30 strongholds that represent required three-inning games and a bonkers sum that makes each of those victories worth about 4,000 XP on its own.

Combine that with a single-team theme team – or maybe one that divides itself into hitters from one team and pitchers from another in a different division – and you have a very efficient way to complete TAS3C1 by going broad and deep in different ways at the same time.

Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1’s Bosses

Assessing the best, most valuable, and least crucial Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 1 cards in each division is a bit tougher than it was for previous Team Affinity releases, because the metagame of Diamond Dynasty and value propositions of Out of Position players are far different than they were previously.

None of these Out of Position cards should be the best option at their given positions for their given teams at this point in the game’s cycle, and those cards from Season 1 and 2 are still eminently usable in Season 3, with a larger number of Wild Card slots making it much easier to integrate more cards that players want to bring forward from past content releases. So what makes an OOP card compelling is more novelty than potency – and while these are 95 OVR cards, they should probably be used only briefly as top-end competitive options, if that.

Another important consideration: OOP players and their in-position regular counterparts cannot be used simultaneously, meaning that you will have to choose between the two instead of having pitching and hitting versions of, say, Dontrelle Willis in your squad. Where the OOP version of a player represents a downgrade on a higher-OVR or more important piece of a squad, that diminishes its value significantly.

AL East

Best card: Orioles RP Manny Machado
First choice: Machado
Last choice: Yankees CF Mariano Rivera

That preamble above aside: Having OOP cards that shore up weaknesses will be a boon for theme teams, while having ones that would hamstring a team to include them will be counterproductive. In the case of the Orioles, adding a reliever that is instantly among the better ones in the game – and has a higher OVR than all but one other Orioles reliever (the Action Figure Felix Bautista) and doesn’t box out a player on the current roster – is a shot in the arm for an area of the squad that is shallow for nearly every team, and would be true even if this Machado weren’t surprisingly well-statted, with 114 H/9 and 118 Pitching Clutch.

Likewise but in reverse, granting the Yankees a center fielder version of Mariano Rivera does not exactly move the needle for a team with Aaron Judge and Juan Soto patrolling the outfield. This Rivera is emphatically inferior to the Live Series Judge – the third-best Judge card in Diamond Dynasty – and slightly inferior to the Hyper Series Soto – the fourth-best Soto card in DD – but also worse than the Action Figure Bernie Williams among free Yankees center fielders. The Yankees don’t need much help, er, anywhere, making an OOP card unlikely to do much for them, but a Rivera at starting pitcher, where he famously began his career, would have been more interesting than one that cannot be anything but a downgrade in the outfield.

The rest of the division’s picks are just ho-hum: Kutter Crawford fills a hole for the Red Sox at shortstop that a really good Trevor Story could fill more effectively; Shane McClanahan is a first baseman who helps out the Rays roster but probably represents too much of an opportunity cost to use over his actual starter card; and Roy Halladay as a Blue Jays second baseman just makes up for what the best Bo Bichettes could have been. 

AL Central

Best card: White Sox RP Adam Dunn
First choice: Dunn
Last choice: Twins SP Byron Buxton

The Central’s choices are fascinating: Reliever versions of Dunn and rising Tigers star Riley Greene, a shortstop Zack Greinke, Buxton as a starting pitcher, and maybe most outstandingly, a Cy Young who hits, albeit not all that well.

Dunn is the best and first card nearly by default because he would be additive rather than a sidegrade like Greene, but a 6’6” lefty with a lot of break plays in plenty of bullpens, even though he lacks top-end velocity. Greene’s card might be a touch better by stats, but the Tigers theme team is hurt considerably by losing Greene’s bat; same goes for Buxton as a hurler, though he’s actually the Twins’ third-best starter by OVR.

Young won’t play over most of the Guardians’ options in the infield and Greinke certainly won’t play over the Royals’ shortstop options – maybe you’ve heard of Bobby Witt Jr.? – but the latter’s catcher eligibility makes him a fun card to try out in lieu of Salvador Perez, and he’s actually a better defensive option than the wily veteran.

AL West

Best card: Mariners LF Randy Johnson
First choice: Athletics RP Mark McGwire
Last choice: Angels SP Mike Trout

A star-studded selection awaits you in the AL West, where Randy Johnson, Mark McGwire, and Nolan Ryan are all inner-circle Hall of Famers in this release whose peaks as players may still have been lower than that of Mike Trout, who also shows up. That the fifth card in the bosses pack is Jonah Heim is a hilarious joke to everyone except Rangers fans, surely.

McGwire as a reliever is a first-choice card without being the best one, as the A’s have bullpen covered by whichever version of Mason Miller is already closing out games in green and gold. But Johnson is a uniquely interesting outfielder because he’s 6’10” with Diamond defense and a 99 Arm; his 61 Speed means he won’t run down everything, but 90 Reactions means he’ll get to plenty, and some excellent hitting stats make him a fine complement to the best versions of Ken Griffey Jr. and Julio Rodriguez who can effectively shunt Raul Ibanez to first and Mitch Haniger to designated hitter … but also means Mike Cameron or Randy Arozarena will have to come off the bench. (And that’s just Mariners outfielders at 97 OVR or better. And Ichiro isn’t in Diamond Dynasty!)

Ryan is slightly less compelling as a center fielder who will have fine range and his own 99 Arm but sacrifices plenty at the plate, but the Astros are also shallower in the outfield than the M’s. Heim is a solid switch-hitting third baseman who probably becomes part of the Rangers’ best configuration when a top-tier Ivan Rodriguez shows up. 

Trout, though, is sadly more of a novelty, with his two-way ability and secondary eligibility at shortstop making it easier to play all of Jim Edmonds, Vladimir Guerrero, and Torii Hunter in the Angels’ outfield but his good-but-not-great stats as both pitcher and hitter probably making using a full-power center fielder Trout a better option.

NL East

Best card: Nationals C Bryce Harper
First choice: Braves SP Austin Riley
Last choice: Mets SS Jacob DeGrom

The NL East’s choices make a lot of real-life sense: Austin Riley was famously a starting pitcher in the high school ranks whom few but the Braves believed in as a hitter; Bryce Harper was a catcher as his career began; Jacob DeGrom played a lot of shortstop at Stetson; and Dontrelle Willis was about as good a hitter as any non-Shohei Ohtani pitcher of the modern era.

The odd man out there is Aaron Nola, who did not actually record an at-bat while at LSU, and whose rep as a two-way player is probably being burnished a bit here by reflected glory from his brother Austin being a strong third baseman. But Nola fits the Phillies’ roster slightly better at short than DeGrom does the Mets’ lineup, even with Jimmy Rollins obviously pegged to the top spot among Phillies shortstops, because Rollins can simply play left field, while displacing the best Francisco Lindor and a 96 OVR Jett Williams to put DeGrom at short or letting DeGrom’s iffier defense play at a secondary spot isn’t such an easy shift – oh, and DeGrom’s pitching cards are a loss if the OOP card is to be gained.

Riley adds to the Braves’ wealth of starters in a way that isn’t super helpful, but pitchers get first choice status because strikeouts are easier to rack up than hits, and his best card at third is actually the Braves’ fourth-best third baseman, behind the expected best-in-class Chipper Jones and a very good Eddie Mathews but also well behind a Nacho Alvarez Topps Now card; this pitcher is the best Riley that Diamond Dynasty is likely to see this year with him slumping in reality.

And while the Harper and Willis are both fun cards perfectly capturing the spirit of OOP players in DD, Harper is the best player in this pack in a walk because he’s a Season 3 catcher and the Nationals aren’t likely to get a better one.

NL Central

Best card: Reds SS Elly De La Cruz
First choice: Pirates C Paul Skenes
Last choice: De La Cruz (yes, again)

Hear me out: This Elly De La Cruz guy may be the most exciting player in baseball in the eyes of many, and this Elly card may be stupendously good for a player who has not pitched an inning as a professional – 99 Velo and Break! Outlier on a 92 MPH slider and a 99 MPH fastball! Control just good enough to make him usable! – but I really do think that removing Elly cards that can actually hit from your lineup is foolish. Even if you can use this one as a stealthy and terrifying pinch runner, there simply isn’t a great reason to sacrifice what De La Cruz can do at the top of the order to have him pitch.

But while the same is sort of true of Paul Skenes being yanked out of the rotation to hit, that’s a more compelling prospect than CC Sabathia hitting (and/or playing the defense of a dancing bear at first), Masyn Winn pitching (even though moving him there makes room for JJ Weatherholt at short on a Cardinals theme team), or Jake Arrieta hitting (which, in fairness, does remove his 99 OVR card from a Cubs rotation whose best pieces are all Wild Card selections and free up some space). And Skenes famously has two-way bona fides: He hit .410 as a freshman and .314 with 13 homers in his second and final season at Air Force before transferring to LSU and leveling up into the fearsome pitcher we see today.

If OOP cards are going to exist in Diamond Dynasty to match the flood of them in every other card-collecting mode, Skenes at catcher is the perfect one of the counterfactual variety: A very good imagining of what a very good and versatile player who ended up specializing could have been if he had taken a different path. Reward that design with your first pick, please; the inevitable Finest or Awards Series versions of both Elly and Paul will be around when we all want them.

NL West

Best card: Padres RP Jake Cronenworth
First choice: Rockies RP Charlie Blackmon
Last choice: Diamondbacks SS Zac Gallen

The NL West’s most notable OOP player is a more forgettable example of the OOP player that doesn’t really need to exist: A Willie Mays at third whom no one would play over the best version of Mays in Diamond Dynasty if presented a binary choice, and whose real life bona fides to the secondary position are very tenuous – in Mays’ case, three separate cameos at first, third, and shortstop in a 1964  season otherwise spent at his customary post in center. This is also a relatively light-hitting version of Mays, which is short shrift for a season in which he slugged 47 homers and had an OPS+ of 172 despite his batting average dipping below .300 for the first time in seven years.

But at least that Mays is a spin on a legend. Did anyone want a shortstop version of Zac Gallen – even Diamondbacks fans? Did the Dodgers need two OOP catchers, especially when the Kenley Jansen here is arguably inferior to the Paul Konerko that is relatively cheap and the same OVR even before considering that Jansen would block high-OVR reliever versions? Cronenworth being a reliever solves a logjam in the infield for the Padres, but even his very good card is just adding to an exceptionally good bullpen.

So kudos are due for making the Rockies’ choice a Blackmon who does ace out using a Chuck Nasty in the outfield, but doesn’t dramatically damage the Rockies’ surprisingly deep pool by hopping out – and a reliever who is by orders of magnitude Colorado’s best option and should be an aesthetically appealing mound presence in game.