I got four questions in game and one on twitter yesterday from traders out there asking why having so many copies of one player is so important, so I want to take some time to walk through the reason.

Gameplay

Each time a player is in your starting lineup, they will score points. If you have more than one of that player in your starting lineup and they score in real life, you will get the number of points awarded times the number of cards of that player you have running. Each card scores independently, which is why many of the top bunters have been chasing down all those pitchers like mad.

Player X’s card is in your lineup and they get a hit = 9 points to your total score
Player X’s card is in your lineup 9 times = 81 points to your total score

If you have boosts of player X, you can play all versions side by side. Last night I ran 9 versions of Jose Quintana, including 2 Gold SR, 2 silver SCR, and 5 red UC. Its the equivalent of playing almost 8-10 extra cards because golds play at x2.0, Silver at x1.75 and Red at x1.5.

Player X’s SR gets a hit = 18 points instead of 9 (x2.0 boost)
Player X’s SR is in your lineup 9 times = scoring at 9x the points or 9 extra common cards.

I know this is confusing at first, but the easy way of putting this is to play as many of a good card as possible – especially pitchers on the mound.

Downside

If your player scores negatively in the game, that many more points will be deducted from your score. If there are boosts involved, they will score at that degree negative as well.

Its imperative that you watch the game in most cases to be effective – either on MLB.com or TV. You do not want to leave your guy in there if he is having a bad night. It can be detrimental to your score for the week.

Collecting

All that being said, there are just some people out there that like to hoard cards, as many collectors do like to keep a lot of copies just to keep. That is the essence of collecting. If you are looking to tear me away from my Joe Mauer cards, you had better be prepared for some quick declines. That’s just part of the game.

That being the case, most of the gamers out there wont have problems trading away a player they have more than 9 copies of in any form. Obviously, since you cant play more than nine cards at a time, its not exactly worth it for a non-collector to keep 85 copies of the same player, unless they can be used for trade bait.

The best way to do this is to play the game the way YOU want to play it. If you want to build a digital card collection, that’s perfect. If you want to be the top bunter in the game, that works too. Just be conscious of the fact that trading with other users may not reflect that same demeanor. You almost have to profile where you think they can fall in the spectrum of gamer vs collector.