Best Card Collecting Mode in 2021: MLB The Show 21's Diamond Dynasty

The king stays the king when it comes to the best card collecting mode in 2021. MLB The Show 21‘s Diamond Dynasty continued to be the most accessible and fun way to build a dream team. However, this also has just about as much to do with what they are doing right as it does with what the other titles continue to do wrong.

Best Card Collecting Mode In 2021: Diamond Dynasty

While the MUTs, and the FUTs, and the MyTeams held steady in their drive to separate honest people from their money in order to acquire the best cards, Diamond Dynasty remained committed to their strategy of providing people with all the cards they could possibly want, assuming you were at least willing to play the game. The stark difference between constantly bumping up against paywalls that would require you to purchase some form of virtual currency in order to even get a whiff of the top players versus actually being rewarded with competitive cards for investing even a small amount of time with the mode made this decision an easy one yet again.

If you didn’t have a ton of time to devote to the game, one of the simplest ways to go about assembling your collection was to play the Topps Now moments that were added weekly throughout the season. Whether these involved completing objectives on the mound or at the plate, they typically all could be done relatively quickly, including some that could be finished in just a single inning or at-bat. The rewards for making these a priority were viable players, and they only got increasingly better as the season went along.

In fact, it’s possible that a team built entirely of the Topps Now moments cards that were released throughout the year could be formidable enough to contend online without being at any sort of huge competitive disadvantage (we even argued that the Topps Now players were so good by the end that it sort of diminished the chase for other cards to an extent). The addition of daily moments also ensured that you had something to do every day when you logged in, and these ultimately enabled you to add some more valuable cards to your collection once you made it through enough of them each month.

There were plenty of ways to play while collecting within Diamond Dynasty besides these moments, and the mode’s versatility deserves to be considered among the mode’s greatest strengths. It didn’t matter whether you preferred to stick to single-player modes like Conquest (with many maps to control) and Showdown (where there were multiple challenges that were replayable), or instead wanted to branch out to online play through modes like Battle Royale, Ranked Seasons, and Events. Casual players could choose to focus on obtaining specific cards that fit their needs or hold sentimental value, while hardcore players could try to add every single one to their collection.

Diamond Dynasty returned an integral part of its existing framework by releasing new inning programs intermittently throughout the year that challenged you to accumulate XP in order to unlock rewards like packs and player cards. There were plenty of ways to earn this XP through both single-player and online modes, and though the best goals did require you to log on fairly regularly if you wanted to reach them before a new inning began, the returns were beneficial enough to justify the time that it took to reach them.

And the nice part about the inning programs was that it wasn’t really a huge deal if you missed out on a card that you really wanted in one of the inning programs (or anywhere else really) because most of the cards in Diamond Dynasty were available on the marketplace should you have sufficient stubs to pay for them. Add that to the fact that it’s much easier to earn packs of all kinds than in other card-collecting modes, and you can see how easy it is to be practically swimming in cards and making tough lineup decisions before you know it.

Haters could say that Diamond Dynasty didn’t exactly do a lot to innovate in MLB The Show 21, and there is some validity to that. From our perspective, we still would like to see more varied and flexible single-player content, and a lot of those same values could tie into more variety in online games as well. That desired “variation” for us ties a lot into giving us reasons to use more of these hundreds of cards online and offline through lineup constructions, challenges, or simply creating more reasons to use bronze/silver/gold cards that all rot once the diamonds start flowing.

Regardless, the refinements to a tried-and-true formula that cater to the “no money spent” crowd kept it head and shoulders above its competitors. For yet another year, MLB The Show 21‘s Diamond Dynasty remains the optimal experience in this realm and is the Best Card Collecting Mode of 2021.

Community Vote – Best Card Collecting Mode In 2021

1. Diamond Dynasty
2. NBA 2K22 MyTeam
3. FIFA Ultimate Team
4. Out Of The Park Baseball ’22 (Perfect Team)

The vote was not close within the community either. Diamond Dynasty ran away with things, MyTeam was a clear silver, and then FUT and Perfect Team were just about tied for the bronze.