Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2: Best Retro Finest Cards, How to Unlock Them

While Diamond Dynasty has been an up-and-down affair in the MLB The Show 24 cycle, one reliable source of good cards and things to do has been the Team Affinity program in its many releases. And while Team Affinity’s first release in Season 3 shook things up with out of position players, Chapter 2 returns to the tried-and-true strategy of giving players some of the best cards in the game by featuring Retro Finest players for all 30 MLB teams.

Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2 Structure

Happily, Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2 also borrows heavily from Chapter 1 in the same Season. There are, as has been the case all year, six distinct sub-programs and six individual reward paths for each of MLB’s six divisions, and players once more must obtain 200,000 Team Affinity XP to complete each one.

But players can still use any players from a division to earn the XP necessary to embark on the reward paths, so it is still trivially easy to build teams to maximize Parallel XP. And the individual stat missions that confer large amounts of Team Affinity XP for completion also return, with a few tweaks – times on base replaces RBI, the total for total bases is higher, and the total for strikeouts is lower, for example.

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

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

• 25 strikeouts with one team’s players: 25,000 Team Affinity XP

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

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

Finishing all of those tasks once with one team’s players is worth 135,000 Team Affinity XP, which is still enough to unlock three of the five TAS3C2 99 OVR Retro Finest bosses. It’s arguably easier to do all four of these tasks than the four from Chapter 1, too, though the XP totals being slightly reduced does help offset the downturn in difficulty.

But that 135,000 plus the 15,000 TA XP on offer for each boss’s individual stat missions – two saves for closing pitchers, 10 strikeouts for the pitchers, five hits for the hitters – is almost enough to finish each path by itself, and adding the 10,000 XP for each division from the rather simple Conquest map makes it trivially easy. Alternately, players can snag 60,000 XP for each of the American and National Leagues from two Showdowns, which is a significant chunk of XP but does require either beating five full-length Showdowns – the first one in each path tasks the player with rallying from a 6-0 deficit with 28 outs to work with, which isn’t hard so much as it is tedious – or getting out of a deep hole after skipping steps on the way to the final challenge.

Each TAS3C2 reward path contains a total of 3,500 Stubs, 15,000 Season 3 XP, nine The Show packs, four Ballin’ is a Habit packs, two random Headliners packs, two Millionaire 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 one pack with cosmetic icons for each team in a given division. Over the six paths, that adds up to 21,000 Stubs, 90,000 Season 3 XP, 54 Show packs, 24 Ballin’ is a Habit packs, 12 Millionaire, and 12 Headliners packs. 

The 90,000 Season 3 XP is way more than the 52,500 S3XP needed to unlock Hall of Fame Stan Musial from the Season 3 XP Reward Path 2, and should get players quite close to unlocking Hall of Fame Pedro Martinez at 140,000 XP.

How to Grind Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2

Ripping through TAS3C2 should be pretty simple: Build a team of one team’s players, head into Conquest or Play vs. CPU games, and beat up on the CPU until your stats stack up. A good game on Rookie in Play vs. CPU with a single-team theme team is going to go a long way to completing those stat missions, and while the Conquest bonus of 10K for each division is something, swiftly unlocking bosses – especially the relievers who can get their two saves in the Conquest games, if you want – is the ticket to supercharging your progress.

Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2’s Bosses

The return of some Retro Finest cards for TAS3C2 does put some powerful cards in the pool for every team in MLB in Diamond Dynasty. The problem with Team Affinity being the program to deliver them, though, is that just how powerful they are varies quite a bit from team to team – and the presence of a Collection tied to the program also means some of the better Retro Finest cards have been appropriated from the program proper to that Collection.

AL East

Best card: Yankees CP Andrew Miller
First choice: Miller
Last choice: Rays SP Matt Moore

Did the Yankees need another great reliever to bolster their theme team? No. But Miller is great, with the lanky lefty status that makes Randy Johnson and others hard to hit, and while he might be a bit homer-prone, he’s got three great pitches that work well together.

The rest of the AL East is underwhelming, with Mike Napoli being a first baseman – but likely to see most use at his secondary position of catcher – nerfing a card unnecessarily, Rafael Palmeiro lacking maxed-out power, Matt Moore lacking top-end velocity, and Shawn Green being a very good but not extraordinary outfielder.

It’s admittedly tough to make the AL East pop with players from the Legends pool that aren’t the Yankees’ best – and, of course, you’d rather have the sort of Mickey Mantle that on par with the Hall of Fame one in the XP Reward Path than a lesser version included in Team Affinity – but this isn’t the best division in this release, and might actually be the worst.

AL Central

Best card: Royals RP Josh Staumont
First choice: Staumont
Last choice: Twins 1B Justin Morneau

Really, you can flip a coin – or maybe look in a mirror – to decide between Staumont and Tigers closer Gregory Soto for best card and first pick in the AL Central, as both are killer relievers who will be fun to use. Staumont’s got a better fastball; Soto’s full arsenal is slightly better.

Eddie Murray, here from his Guardians stint – with cart art working off a picture that cleverly hides that he was playing for the Indians well before the Guardians’ existence – is a fine hitter whose switch-hitting is always welcome, but does not have the sort of power that stands out at first base at this point in DD. James McCann is a better catcher than Napoli, but not a better hitter. And Justin Morneau may be the worst selection in all of TAS3C2: He’s a well-rounded hitter at first base, but both a Silver defender and a plodder on the basepaths. Ideally, you would use him at designated hitter, but there are approximately dozens of better picks for that spot.

AL West

Best card: Athletics CP Dennis Eckersley
First choice: Eckersley
Last choice: Angels 3B Troy Glaus

A weird set of players this AL West quintet is: Eckersley is a classic choice for the A’s, whose Legends pool has been drained considerably without Jimmie Foxx, but Troy Glaus is the only other non-active player in this set, and none of Joey Gallo, James Paxton, and George Springer really moves the meter at this moment. (Eckersley being an excellent closer also makes him the obvious first choice.)

Gallo and Glaus are both lower-contact – neither has a Contact rating over 100 – and power-rich third basemen, making Gallo’s slightly superior defending and positional flexibility the factors that give him an edge over Glaus, who does have the ability to play at shortstop. Paxton is a solid workhorse starter, but that’s not a thrilling prospect in mid-October. And Springer has an all-around game that fits well in the outfield, but I confess to personal bias against him here, as I’ve never hit well with a Springer card.

NL East

Best card: Marlins LF Christian Yelich
First choice: Braves CP Craig Kimbrel
Last choice: Nationals 3B Anthony Rendon

The NL East’s choices are, curiously, all players not currently active with their chosen teams – and in the cases of active players Kimbrel, Rendon, and Yelich, their departures happened quite a while ago, making these some true retrospective cards.

Yelich gets the top spot here because he combines speed and contact well despite some limited power, which is enough to edge out Kimbrel – your standard fireballer, and one whose sidearm delivery can leave a lot of heaters flat. Leiter is a finesse lefty; Utley is a very good second baseman whose pop is limited; Rendon, whom I can’t imagine even Nationals diehards really want to use, is at least a throwback to a time when he was good at baseball.

NL Central

Best card: Cubs SP Ferguson Jenkins
First choice: Jenkins
Last choice: Cardinals 1B Mark McGwire

The NL Central is the only division in this Team Affinity release to have five Legends players, and they’re all great picks for their given teams, with Jenkins, McGwire and Joe Morgan truly embodying the ideal of TA picks being icons for their franchises, and Jason Bay and Richie Sexson at least being fan favorites for theirs.

That said, Jenkins is the clear first pick in this pack in a walk, as the only pitcher, and Bay is probably the best hitter by a mile: Morgan has negligible power, McGwire lacks contact and defense and has a swing that is difficult to master, and Sexson is mostly a slightly better version of Big Mac. 

These may be Legends to a man, but these Finest cards are not all for their absolute finest seasons as major leaguers.

NL West

Best card: Dodgers CP Eric Gagne
First choice: Gagne
Last choice: Rockies SP Kyle Freeland

And then we have the NL West, which is by some margin the weirdest division in this TA release. Gagne is a stellar player and choice for the Dodgers, and his best cards are always great.

But beyond that, we have Mike Cameron from his brief and merely pretty good stint with the Padres – with whom he won one Gold Glove and was never an All-Star or a .275 hitter – and three younger players with Finest cards from 2018 or later in Kyle Freeland, Daulton Varsho, and Mike Yastrzemski. Cameron and Yaz both have cromulent, well-rounded cards, but Varsho is either a power lefty bat as an outfielder or a catcher playing a secondary position without the power some of the better ones have. 

And still that might be better than Freeland, for whom “good Rockies pitcher” is damning with faint praise, especially given his finesse-heavy makeup not working well at Coors Field these days – or really since the 2018 season that spawned this Finest card.

Team Affinity Season 3 Chapter 2 Collection

We would also be remiss not to note that there is effectively a second part of this TAS3C2 release in the form of a Collection with more players to unlock.

Those players are:

• Reds RP Rob Dibble (10 players)

• Yankees SP Mike Mussina (15 players)

• Twins 2B Brian Dozier (20 players)

• Dodgers RF Cody Bellinger (30 players)

• Angels CF Mike Trout (40 players)

These are five excellent cards, arguably better than any of the ones in the divisional reward path, and Bellinger, Dibble, and Trout specifically are best-in-class candidates. It behooves players to add these TAS3C2 cards to the Collection as they unlock them, and also to pick up the few Finest Series players outside of those reward paths – Camilo Doval and John Franco are the two currently available – that are currently necessary to unlock Trout, though it’s a good bet that more will be released over time.