How to Flip Cards in MLB The Show 26: Flip Diamonds, Skip the Golds

Flip Red Diamonds as soon as you can afford one, flip them in the evening, and leave the Golds alone.

I'm not much of a flipper. I can count my quick resales this season on one hand, and the fastest one is why this post starts with the tax.

On June 24 I meant to buy one Live Series Paul Skenes and bought two, at 15,400 each. Eleven minutes later I sold the extra one for 15,299. A 101-stub slip, I figured. The tax made it 1,631.

In the same minute I'd bought a Juan Soto for 10,000. I held him four days and sold him for 22,249: 10,024 stubs after tax, my best trade of the season, and not a flip at all. So I'm not writing this as a flipper. I'm writing it as the guy who went and checked whether flipping is worth it. It depends almost entirely on what you flip.

The only math you need

A flip is two orders. You put in a buy order one stub above the best one, wait for somebody to sell into it, then list a sell order one stub under the cheapest Buy Now and wait for somebody to buy it.

The market tax takes 10% of the sale. So the sale has to come in about 11% above what you paid just to break even. Not 10%. Ten percent of the higher number is more than ten percent of the lower one.

Here's a real one. On the evening of October 16, six straight sales of the Finest Jake Arrieta, between 7:39 and 7:49 PM Eastern, went 5,000, 6,990, 5,000, 6,999, 5,001, 5,001. That's both ends of a flip filling minutes apart. Buy at 5,001, sell at 6,999, the tax takes 700, and you keep 1,298 stubs.

That's the whole trick. Everything else is picking which card to do it on. The tax math guide has the full formula if you want it.

The gap on your screen isn't the flip. The sales are.

The obvious place to look for a flip is the gap between the best buy order and Buy Now. That gap is a snapshot. It doesn't tell you whether anybody is actually trading at either end of it.

So I didn't use it. I used completed sales instead: every hour, for every card, from July 13 to October 17. That's 4.3 million card-hours. For each hour I asked one question. Did the card sell low enough and high enough that a buy order at the bottom and a sell order at the top would both have filled and still paid the tax?

In hours where a card sold at least five times (3.1 million of them, across 2,743 cards), the answer was yes 87% of the time. I ran a harder version too: the high price had to still be there in the next hour, so a single fat-finger sale couldn't count. That came out at 86%.

So the spread is real. On almost every card that trades, people buy at one price and sell at another, hour after hour. The question that actually matters is how much that gap is worth.

A Bronze flip is 17 stubs

Every rarity flips. Only two of them pay.

A typical Bronze flip makes 17 stubs. You'd need about 69 of them to match one Diamond flip, and more than 140 to match one Red Diamond. Silver is no better at 20. The percentages on cheap cards look enormous because the prices are tiny. Percent of nothing is nothing.

Diamonds are where flipping is worth your time. In the hours a flip worked, a typical Diamond made about 1,170 stubs and a typical Red Diamond about 2,400, and it worked in 95–97% of busy hours. Count the hours it didn't work too and you still get about 1,100 and 2,300.

Golds fill the least, for the thinnest margin

Lowest fill rate of any rarity. A typical Gold flip worked in only 67% of busy hours. On the harder test Gold still came last: 62% of busy Gold hours passed, against 75% for Silver, the next-worst, and 87% or better for the rest. When it does work, it pays 40 stubs. That's roughly 11% of what you paid, the thinnest margin of any rarity.

I don't know yet why Golds trade this way. I just know the numbers, and they say don't.

"Diamond" means 5,000 and up

The cheap Diamonds sit in the dead zone.

Sort by price instead of rarity and a dead zone shows up between 1,000 and 5,000 stubs. A typical flip there makes 185 stubs, under 8% of what you paid. And most of the cards that trade there are Diamonds: 286 of the 374 cards that had a busy hour in that price range. So "flip Diamonds" really means flip Diamonds that sell for 5,000 or more.

The sweet spot is 5,000 to 20,000: about 1,530 stubs a flip, roughly 19% of what you paid, and both ends filled in 97% of busy hours. Above 100,000 a flip makes about 14,900 stubs, but that's only 9% on a lot of money sitting in one card.

Red Diamonds have one more thing going for them. In 97 days, not one sold below 5,000, and about one Red Diamond hour in five bottomed out at exactly 5,000. That's the quick-sell floor: every Red Diamond is 95 OVR or better, and the community's MLB 26 quick-sell table puts a 95+ card at 5,000 stubs (10,000 for Live Series), so nobody sells one for less. Going by that table, a Red Diamond bought at 5,001, like that Arrieta, can't lose more than the stub you bid over the floor.

A flip takes time, and the waits aren't equal

A flip isn't instant. You put in the buy order and wait for somebody to sell into it. Then you list the card and wait for somebody to buy it. I estimated both waits on 240 cards, 40 of each rarity, from the last 200 sales SDS shows for each one on the afternoon of October 18.

October isn't a fair test, though. The regular season's over and most of the cards I sampled sold about a fifth as often in the week of October 11 as they did in July. So I also scaled each card's wait to how often it sold from July 13 to August 31, the busiest stretch in my data. If your order is first in line every time, here's about the shortest one full flip could take on a typical card:

Red Diamonds turn as fast as anything on the market. Plain Diamonds are the slow ones. They pay well per flip, but one flip ties up your stubs about four times as long as a Red Diamond.

That's the generous count: any sale in the lower half of a card's price range counts as filling your buy order. Count only sales near the very bottom and very top and the cheap cards take about half again as long, or more. Red Diamonds barely change in October, and go from about 6 minutes to about 8 mid-season.

What your stub balance changes

Profit per flip is only half of it. Put it together with how long a flip takes and you get stubs per hour, and the best card for that depends on how many stubs you're flipping with.

Here's the example math at mid-season pace. Margins were thinner then: a typical Red Diamond flip made about 1,570 stubs, not the 2,400 it made over the whole 97 days. Say you can keep up to five flips going at once. Each one makes the typical profit for its rarity from July 13 to August 31, in the hours a flip worked, scaled down by how often it worked, and takes as long as the mid-season column says:

One row worked through: a Red Diamond sitting on the floor. You buy at 5,001. A typical flip on those cards made about 309 stubs after tax mid-season, it worked in about 94% of busy hours, and one flip took about 8 minutes. 309 × 0.94 × 60 ÷ 8 is about 2,200 stubs an hour.

At October's pace the same budgets make about a quarter as much: about 130, 540, 3,700 and 7,400 an hour.

These are ceilings, not forecasts. They assume you're first in line every time and the price holds, and in a busy market more flippers are in line with you. Use them to compare one budget with the next, not to plan your week.

What to flip at your budget

Your flipping budget is the stubs you can tie up in buy orders without touching the cards you play with. Here's what I'd flip at each size, smallest to largest.

Under 1,000 stubs: Silvers. Pick Silvers that sell for about 100 stubs and run a few at once. They're the quickest cheap flip, about 9 minutes mid-season, and five at once makes about 480 an hour on paper. That's about 35 flips and 70 orders an hour, so your hands run out long before your stubs do. Commons and Bronze make less an hour. Skip Golds, which fill the least of anything.

1,000 to 5,000: still Silvers, and save. This is where it's tempting to buy one cheap Diamond. Don't. Diamonds under 5,000 are the dead zone: mid-season a flip made about 186 stubs and worked in only 77% of busy hours. One of them ties up about 3,500 stubs to make about 440 an hour, less than five Silvers make on 500. Keep flipping Silvers until you clear 5,000.

5,000 to 10,000: one Red Diamond on the floor. Find a Red Diamond selling at or just above 5,000 and bid 5,001. It makes about 2,200 an hour, more than four times what five Silvers do, and going by the community quick-sell table, the most you can lose is the stub you bid over the floor.

10,000 to 25,000: one typical Red Diamond. A typical Red Diamond sold for about 9,900 mid-season and makes about 15,900 an hour, around seven times what one on the floor makes. Two floor Red Diamonds make about 4,400. A plain Diamond at about the same price makes about 3,200, because a flip takes almost half an hour. Once you can afford a typical Red Diamond, it beats everything else.

25,000 to 100,000: several Red Diamonds at once. Two typical Red Diamonds make about 31,800 an hour on paper. Spread across several cards instead of putting it all in one. If one price moves against you, it's one card, not your whole budget.

Over 100,000: more Red Diamonds, not one big card. A card that sells for 100,000 or more made about 14,900 a flip, but a typical one had a flip open about 12 hours a day, against about 18 for a typical Red Diamond, and it ties up all your stubs in one card. Past that, stubs stop being the limit and your time takes over.

Flip at night

Same cards, same tax, half again the margin after dinner.

On Diamonds and Red Diamonds, the typical flip makes about 9% of what you paid at 6 AM Eastern and about 15% at 10 PM. It climbs through the afternoon and holds from around 4 PM to midnight. Every hour still clears the tax. The evening hours just clear it by more. And it's the same cards, not different ones: of the 579 Diamonds and Red Diamonds that were busy at both times, nearly 90% paid a fatter margin at 10 PM than at 6 AM.

My guess is this is the other half of the overnight-selling problem: the people dumping cards first thing in the morning are the same people making the morning gap thin. I haven't measured that part.

What the data can't tell you

How many of those fills you'd get. Other flippers sit on the same cards at the same prices, and every one of them is willing to outbid you by a stub. My numbers show that trades happened at both ends. They don't show who got them. Treat every figure here as what the market offered, not what lands in your account.

It also can't save you from the price moving under you. A flip assumes the card is worth tomorrow what it was worth today. On a content drop or a roster update that stops being true, and the tax makes it worse: you pay 10% on the way out whether you won or lost.

What to do with this

• Flip Red Diamonds. They pay the most per flip and turn as fast as anything: about 6 minutes a flip mid-season, about 40 now.
• Under 5,000 stubs, flip Silvers, a few at a time, until you can afford a Red Diamond on the floor.
• Plain Diamonds pay, slowly. Worth it at 5,000 and up, but a flip takes four to five times as long as a Red Diamond.
• Skip Golds. Worst fill rate, thinnest margin.
• Skip Bronze. The spread is real and worth about 17 stubs.
• Skip Diamonds under 5,000. They're in the dead zone.
• Place your sell orders in the evening, not before work.
• Need 11%, not 10%. If Buy Now isn't about 11% above your buy order, there's no flip.
• Stop on content drops and roster updates. The price moves under you.

The Flips page shows the after-tax profit using the same buy-plus-one, sell-minus-one math, and Hot Flips ranks them by profit per hour. The Flips & ROI guide walks through reading the Flips table, and Hot Flips explains its own ranking on the page.

Every number here comes from DiamondOps market data: completed sales by the hour for every card, July 13 to October 17, 2026 (2,162 cards with at least 24 hours of five or more sales). Quick-sell values are the community-verified MLB 26 table. A flip "worked" in an hour when the card sold low enough and high enough in that hour that a buy order at the low and a sell order at the high would both have filled after the 10% tax. "Typical" is the median card. The Arrieta sales are from SDS's own listing data on October 16. The wait times come from the same listing data on the afternoon of October 18: the last 200 sales of 240 cards, 40 per rarity, each sale counted as a buy-side or sell-side fill by which half of the card's price range it landed in, so the wait times are estimates and on the short side. Mid-season waits scale each card's October 18 wait by how much more often that card sold from July 13 to August 31; SDS shows only the last 200 sales, so a July wait can't be measured directly. Cards that first sold after August 31 are left out of the mid-season numbers, and a card released during the window is timed from its first sale. Stubs per hour assume you're first in line and keep up to five flips going. My own trades are from my DiamondOps order history, with the tax applied. Hours are Eastern, reading SDS's sale timestamps as UTC. None of this says how many fills you would win against other flippers. Drafted and crunched with editorial AI on my data; the takes are mine.

I'm Shaun. If something is wrong, tell me.