Player Set Construction
All-Time Greats V consists of 3,768 Strat-O-Matic cards:
- every card that's ever appeared in ATGs I-IV (3,411 in all)
- the 103 players of SOM's Negro League All-Stars set
- 254 cards new to ATG, including:
- 129 cards borrowed from other existing SOM Online sets
- 125 brand new cards never before seen in SOM Online
The list of all the players in the Negro League All-Stars set can be viewed here.
Multiple years per player
For the first time in SOM Online history, players can have more than one card available each - for instance, Babe Ruth's 1921 and 1927 cards are both available. However, only one card for each player may be owned in a given league at any time; thus, you won't see 2 Rickey Hendersons in the same outfield, and you won't see any Koufax vs. Koufax pitching duels.
How the Salary Cap Auto-Draft works
Each different card for a player has its own different salary, based on the value of that card. You can choose to put ONE card for any given player on your draft list. Say you choose Babe Ruth's 1927 card, because of its historical significance. Someone else in your league chooses Ruth's 1921 card, because it's even more of an offensive monster. Let's say you ranked your Babe higher, so the auto-draft awards him to you, and the other team receives a LF replacement as expected. You now are the sole owner of Babe Ruth in your league, with his 1927 card.
Waivers
Waivers works as expected; you can place claims on specific cards (e.g. Johnny Bench 1975), and, when waivers claims are processed, if another team happens to claim any card of that player (e.g. Johnny Bench 1978), his 1975 card is no longer available to you.
How in-season transactions work
If a team drops a player, that card as well as every other available card for that player in the set is made available in the free agent pool. This means that another team (or the same team) may pick up a different card for that player if it chooses to.
Trading with other teams is not affected; if you have Mike Schmidt's 1980 card on your team, that is the only Mike Schmidt card you may trade to another team.
The Negro League All-Stars
Download the free .PDF version of the guide book that comes with the Negro League All-Stars card set. It delivers you valuable information on the history of The Negro Leagues, how Strat-O-Matic analyzed the data, and biography information on every player.
Double-carded players
Unfortunately, the 5 players that have both a pitcher and a hitter card in the original Negro League All-Stars set each have only 1 of their cards available in ATG V. This was purely for clerical reasons; if/when we get the data for the 5 extra cards from SOM, we'll put them into ATG V.
Ballparks
The ballparks available in ATG V are the same 112 from ATG IV, plus the 16 ballparks that are included with the Negro League All-Stars set.
Subsets
For reasons that will be discussed soon, the usual corresponding subsets (AL-Only, NL-Only, Pre-WW2, Post-WW2) are not yet available. They will be soon.
Live drafts
Live drafts were made available for ATG V on Thursday, February 11, 2010. Note: in an effort to expedite the availability of the Live Draft for ATG V, we resorted to a hack where only the most expensive card for each player is represented in the draft. This means when you see "Babe Ruth" in there, that's really his 1921 card (thus he's ranked #1), and that card is what you'll ultimately get on your roster if you draft him. There is no added feature where you can instantly switch to his 1927 card, at least for the time being. So you'll have to drop a card to the free agent pool and pick up your desired alternate, as is the usual case.