2021 MLB Showdown Set -- World Series Champion Atlanta Braves

 The weather outside my still be frightful, and the lockout is not delightful..... but we've got a plethora of new Showdown cards to share -- the entire 2021 Set!!! Once again, this set was made entirely on the MLB Showdown Bot, which is how we made the 2019 remake set too. What does this mean? For starters, it guarantees consistency in point values and across seasons. Not only does this mean guys from 2019 set can easily cross with 2021 and vice versa, but these cards fit seamlessly into the original 2001 set! Thanks to Matt's hard work with cutouts, we've got OVER 700 players coming to the blog over the next few weeks. That's right -- thanks to the speed at which cards can be made/calculated on the BOT, we made a lot of more "marginal" statistical players and, frankly, cards per roster since we could! 

Per feedback from you, the readers, we're releasing cards with bleed to make it easier for y'all to use these free cards at home and we're releasing them one team at a time instead of dumping full divisions.

The first team to be released, per tradition, is the World Series champions -- the Atlanta Braves!! Atlanta entered the postseason as the 3 seed in the NL, only winning 88 regular season games, but in a recipe for success straight out of 1995, rode excellent pitching through the postseason and onto breaking the seemingly always heart-breaking curse that's been felt by the city of Atlanta these past 25 years and change. Those 88 wins are also deceptive because the Pythagorean W-L record was 94-68, which is far more indicative of a team's Showdown strength. But speaking of 1995, here's a little treat:

The famed and Cooperstown enshrined big three, circa 1995

Now, let's get to the most recent champion from the ATL:

2019 Bot Set -- NL East

 Hello everyone -- it's been a while since we posted any Showdown baseball cards! Like many of you, we here at the Greatest MLB Showdown project have been captivated by the true greatest gift to showdown fans in the last twenty years: The MLB Showdown BOT. Like so many of you, we've had an absolute blast using it (see my previous post of best 32 teams in last 30 years)!!! Indeed, the ability to instantly compare cards for players/teams across seasons is intoxicating, and the upload a picture function makes it extremely easy to churn out GORGEOUS cards. 

Recently, it got a bunch of us here thinking: why not try making a whole set out of BOT cards? 

While we love our original 2018 and 2019 sets here, we're aware they were made during our early stages of formula construction and were not made with equalizing stats to other seasons in mind. Thus, it seemed the perfect place to start our test run of an entire set was the 2019 season.... and it didn't disappoint!

So without further ado, we start our 2019 Bot Set with the NL East, home of the World Series Champion Washington Nationals, despite losing this guy in free agency before the season (but he'll still pop up below, just in different colors ;)).

As you can see, he's very similar to our 2018 Harper except for a HUGE difference -- OB 9 instead of OB 10, as he's compared generally across time vs within a single season's bubble. This makes this card more accurate when mixed in with original 00/01 cards, which we enjoy and reckon you dear readers will appreciate more too!