Headliners Set 2 Veteran Billy Wagner replaces Prospect Spencer Torkelson in Headliners packs today. He is a 90 overall. We are also getting a Prospect Julio Rodriguez added to the Chase Set 1 packs to go with Awards Albert Pujols.
Of the two new cards, Veteran Billy Wagner seems like the bigger deal since bullpen help early in the year (especially from the left side) is always in high demand. Wagner has a 97 mph fastball, and mixes that in with a slider, changeup, and curveball. He has 86 control of the fastball and 81 control of the slider. Wagner is generally a solid option in DD in any form, and the 107 H/9 is an added bonus here for sure.
Headliners Set 2 Veteran Billy Wagner
Here are his ratings:
Here are his quirks:
The odds on Headliners packs to pull a diamond are 1:10 (as always), albeit that diamond might not be Veteran Billy Wagner. In addition, this year you can buy one pack of the Headliners choice pack, which gives you 1:3 odds of pulling a 90+ overall diamond (and of course costs more stubs).
Chase Set 1 Prospect Julio Rodriguez
The other new card added today is the Prospect Julio Rodriguez. He is a 90 overall and now goes into the pool with Awards Albert Pujols in any Chase packs you might find in your The Show packs. Folks who have been playing DD for a couple years should be used to seeing Rodriguez at this point. He’s about to become more of a fixture in our normal baseball lives, so this is why we’re getting him back here once again.
I would say outfield is a position of strength overall in DD right now (especially with right-handed hitters), but Rodriguez still looks solid. He has good attributes against LHP and RHP, plus he’s usable at all three outfield positions and has decent speed. The Pujols card should retain more value than this Rodriguez card due to being a more rare card series and a 96 overall vs. a 90 overall. That said, I have heard some mixed reviews on the Pujols card, and Pujols can be hard to use at times in DD, so Rodriguez might end up being just as usable in the long run.
Because the Chase Set is a new card series, it’s unclear how long we’ll be on Set 1 and how many more cards might be added to this set, so it’s hard to gauge where the prices will go on any of these cards for the time being. They remain the rarest packs and the hardest to find, so I have to believe all the cards in this Chase Set will hold up better than most, but it also comes down to whether or not SDS starts giving us guaranteed Chase packs in other forms than just a 50 pack bundle you can buy in the Show Shop.
You could also theoretically use this Prospect Julio Rodriguez in pursuit of the 91 overall Prospect Adley Rutschman card, but that would be a poor use of resources considering you can just grab “normal” gold Prospect cards to get that collection reward.
