How to Make Stubs in MLB The Show 26 (and the 180,000 I Locked in a Collection)

Most of the stubs a launch-week Diamond will ever be worth are there early, and in my game one of the easiest ways to give them up is to put it in a collection.

I know because I did it twice. I barely played MLB The Show 26 — I spent the season building the site that tracks its market. Most of my cards came from packs: 1,255 of them between March 13 and September 26, 725 of them The Show Packs. Two of the best pulls were Live Series Diamonds rated 90, and like the first copy of every Live Series card I pulled, both went straight into a collection. In my game, a card in a collection is locked: I can't list it or sell it.

The Francisco Lindor came out of a The Show Pack on April 11. That day it would have sold instantly for 92,175 stubs. On October 17 nobody had a buy order in for it at all; the cheapest one listed was 3,900. The José Ramírez came on the evening of May 23. The next day an instant sale would have paid 107,250. On October 17, 3,000. Both are rated 85 now.

After the 10% tax, that's about 179,500 stubs I could have had for two cards. It's nearly twice the most I ever had in my account at once, as far back as the app recorded it.

The two Diamonds I collected, priced around the day I pulled them and on October 17. The typical launch-week Live Series Diamond fell less, but it still fell to under a quarter.

So this is a guide to making stubs, written by someone who made a lot of them by accident and kept the wrong ones. Every method below gets a number from our own data, a community source where the game doesn't publish one, or an honest "we can't measure this".

The one rule: a launch-week Diamond is worth the most early

Take the 50 Live Series cards that were rated 85 or higher when we first priced them, in launch week. Their typical asking price was 16,965 stubs. On October 17 it was 3,825. 47 of the 50 are cheaper now.

Not every card goes down. Roster updates push some Live Series cards up, and that's a way to make stubs I'll come to. But a card that starts the season as a Diamond has usually seen its best price by the time most people think about selling it. Every method below is a version of the same question: how fast can you turn what you got into stubs?

Sell what you pull

We take the official pack odds and price every card in them at the October 17 market. A The Show Pack is worth about 414 stubs on average if you sell everything in it. The Diamonds and Red Diamonds are 44% of that, and two cards — Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, each in about 1 pack in 10,000 — are about a fifth of it on their own. A JUMBO The Show Pack is worth about 4,470.

Those are averages, not profits. We don't store what the game charges for a pack, so we can't tell you whether buying one makes or loses stubs. What we can tell you is what to do once you've opened it: sell the Diamonds you don't need in the first few days. My 1,255 packs gave me 188 Diamond and Red Diamond player cards, and the two I've already told you about were the expensive lesson.

Program rewards: sell the ones you can, in the first two days

Most program rewards aren't stubs at all. Of the 543 card rewards in our program data, 490 can't be sold — 90%. They're yours to play with, and worth nothing on the market.

The 53 you can sell are worth the most right away. Their typical asking price is 45,911 stubs on the day they first hit the market, 30,992 the next day, 15,777 three days later and 9,398 a week later. Then they level off. 41 of the 53 were cheaper on October 17 than on their first day.

The 53 sellable program reward cards in our data, by days since each one first hit the market.

Don't plan around the first-day price; the typical card lost a third of it by the next day. But three days in it was already down by about two-thirds. If a reward can be sold and you don't want to use it, list it in the first two days.

Programs also pay stubs directly. June Countdown paid up to 86,000, by SDS's own count. Stubs don't lose value, but programs end — June Countdown did — so finish the ones that pay before the deadline.

What we can't tell you is stubs per hour. We can't measure how long a program takes you to finish.

Live Series collections cost stubs, they don't make them

Everything in this section rests on what I see in my game: a card in a collection is locked and can't be sold. Given that, collecting isn't free. It costs you the card's price on the day you lock it, and for a launch-week Diamond that price is usually far higher early in the season than late.

Here's what a Live Series collection gives you back. Every Live Series collection reward card we could check — 37 of the 39 — is unsellable, so it has no market value at all. Other collections pay some packs, but across all the collection reward cards we could check, only 2 of 99 can be sold.

And here's what it costs. By our count of the cards the 30 Live Series team collections ask for, buying all of them at the October 17 asking price would cost 1,445,537 stubs. Two cards are 65% of that: Ohtani at 539,993 and Judge at 399,898. The typical team costs 13,669, and the Dodgers alone cost 581,115.

None of that means don't collect. The rewards are good cards, and plenty of people play the game to use them. It means the price of a collection is every card you lock into it, priced on the day you lock it. Wait, and it costs less: the same cards that cost 2,754,149 stubs on April 15 — counting only the ones that had a price yet — cost about half that by October.

I paid April and May prices. Don't.

Quick-sell: only for the cheap cards

Community guides say quick-sell pays a set amount by rating and series. SDS doesn't publish the table. ShowZone's MLB 26 table puts a Live Series Diamond at 3,000 stubs at 85 and 7,500 at 90, and other series at half; other guides differ on the 90s.

At those values, the market pays more for most cards, even after the 10% tax. On October 17, quick-sell would have beaten listing for fewer than one card in seven. Live Series Golds are the exception: quick-sell would have beaten listing for 55% of them.

For a Live Series Diamond, listing it would have paid a typical few hundred stubs more than quick-selling. That's not much. If you need the stubs tonight, quick-sell is fine. If you can wait for a sale, list it.

Flipping

Flipping is buying low and selling high on the same card. It's one of two methods here that run on stubs you already have. I covered it in full in the flipping guide. The short version: when a flip works, a Diamond pays about 1,170 stubs after tax and a Red Diamond about 2,400. A Gold pays about 40. You need an 11% gap, not 10%, just to break even.

Flip Red Diamonds as soon as you can afford one, and skip the Golds.

Buying ahead of a roster update

The other one is buying a Live Series card before it gets upgraded. Over the six roster updates we checked, buying a week out made +333 stubs per 1,000 spent on cards with a Diamond Radar score of 70 or higher. Buying the night before made +62. The full numbers are in when to buy before a roster update.

It's not free money. From May to September, a card with a Diamond Radar score of 90 or higher got upgraded 78% of the time, and the misses cost a typical 232 stubs per 1,000 for cards bought the night before. Bought a week out, the same misses roughly broke even. What a miss costs has the rest.

What we can't measure

Some ways to make stubs leave no trace in our data, so I won't put a number on them:

• Daily Rewards. Not in our data.
• The Show Shop. We don't store what anything costs there.
• Battle Royale rewards. Not in our data.
• Stubs per hour from any mode. Ranked, Events, Conquest, Mini Seasons, Diamond Quest — we know which programs they feed, not what they pay you per hour or per game.

You can also buy stubs with real money. That's not making them, so it isn't on this list.

What to do with this

1. Sell sellable rewards in the first two days, and launch-season Diamonds you don't need early. That's usually when they're worth the most.
2. Don't lock Diamonds into a collection early — if a collected card is locked in your game too — unless you'd rather have the reward than the stubs. It's a fair trade if you know the price.
3. Finish programs that pay stubs before they end. The stubs keep; the program doesn't.
4. List, don't quick-sell, unless it's a Gold or you need the stubs now.
5. Flip and buy ahead of updates only with stubs you can afford to tie up.

Market prices are the last asking price and buy order DiamondOps recorded on each day, MLB The Show 26, through October 17, 2026. Program and collection data is what our syncs captured from May 29, 2026. Quick-sell values are community-compiled; SDS doesn't publish them. Pack values use the official odds and October 17 prices, and leave out equipment, which we don't price. The two Diamonds are from my own synced account.

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