Likewise, the cheapest card pack is 1,500 Stubs, equivalent to $1.49. If you do choose to speed up the process with cash, you’ll find the cheapest pack of Stubs costs 99 cents for 1,000 Stubs.
Much like in MLB The Show 20, it’s surprisingly easy to rack up Stubs by regularly nailing Moments and Conquests, and you can always just sell cards and items you don’t want to the community market for even more, so you aren’t likely to feel a lot of pressure to spend. You don’t ever need to shell out real-world money in order to get Stubs, since you can simply earn them by completing challenges across other sections of Diamond Dynasty (such as by completing specific challenges in the delightful Moments mode) or by staking the field in Conquest mode. This is the currency used to purchase card packs and entries to specific competitive game modes in Diamond Dynasty, like Battle Royale and certain Showdown series. Microtransaction ReactionJust as we’ve seen for years now, MLB The Show 21 includes microtransactions in the form of Stubs. However, it’s disappointing that there is still no way to take your Franchise mode team head to head with others online, especially given that this year’s addition of cross-platform multiplayer in standard play seems like a perfect opportunity for that. The main difference is that it’s much more generous: you can carry your Road to the Show player over with all their stats intact, and it introduces the new Community Parallel cards, which let you level up each player card up to five times to keep them relevant for longer.Īnd of course, MLB The Show 21’s Franchise mode benefits greatly from custom stadiums and the ability to bring your Road to the Show player into your custom teams. It offers the same diverse set of modes like last year’s fantastic Showdown, Battle Royale, and more. Over in the Diamond Dynasty card collection mode, things are a bit friendlier this year. Additionally, its momentum system that makes your team play better or worse based on your performance is still great and leads to some exciting comebacks. March to October mode isn’t too much different this year than last, but it still lets you take the reins of your team of choice and participate in vignettes where your decision as a pinch hitter can change the dynamic of a ballgame. The list of modes hasn’t gotten any longer this year and pretty much everything is carried over from MLB The Show 20, but there are a handful of notable improvements.
When it comes to content, there is still no baseball simulator on the planet that is as attentive to its teams and rosters, as meticulous with the momentum of its on-field baseball simulation, or as awash with diverse and interesting gameplay modes as MLB The Show. This is buried in the Diamond Dynasty menus, and it heavily encourages you to engage with those systems instead of giving you the best results by sticking solely to Road to the Show mode like in MLB The Show 20. “There's also a potential downside for diehard Road to the Show fans in that because of this year’s broader focus on Diamond Dynasty interweaving into each of the other modes, the best way to progress in Road to the Show is no longer directly by playing in that mode, but rather through Programs, which is basically like a Battle Pass from a game like Fortnite or Destiny 2, where you complete daily objectives to essentially level up and earn rewards. Given how insubstantial the changes are to the mechanics of how characters work in MLB The Show 21 this is surprising – I can’t imagine what’s so different about this year’s version that would prevent a feature that’s carried over for years. The bummer here is that you can no longer move your save file forward from previous games in the series, meaning you need to start fresh.
Gabriel Moss, MaScore: 8 Read the full MLB The Show 20 Review Another nice touch is that when you take your custom Road to the Show player into Diamond Dynasty or Franchise mode you can finally pair them with your own custom teams.
That said, those who haven’t picked up an MLB The Show since 17 or 18 will absolutely find that MLB The Show 20 is the best place to pick the series back up. But even with the excellent new Showdown mode, longtime fans may be just a little turned off by the lack of big new changes.
Developer Sony San Diego has tweaked and tightened everything that was presented in MLB The Show 19, and as a result, playing baseball on a console has never been this fluid. In what feels like a minor but noticeable update, MLB The Show 20 doesn’t break what wasn’t broken.