Can you please confirm how the claiming DURING the season would work? If I leave a spot open and you pull a Yogi Berra card from a pack, can I then claim/scream "Yogi Berra!" and get that card?
Or do I only get the Yogi Berra cards that are opened after I claim?
Though I am still working on the rules themselves, this question has a couple of aspects that can be explained with certainty.
#1 - "If I leave a spot open..." - First, you do not need to leave spots open to participate or to lay claim to cards or hold a place. The "Top 20" is merely a way to kickstart the season. So, even if you fill up your initial 20 spots, you will still be allowed to claim players during the season. So, by the end of the season, some people may have claimed 30 players and others only claimed 6. It's all about what YOU want to collect (and how the initial draft plays out, of course)!
#2 - "Can I then claim/scream 'Yogi Berra!' and get that card?" - Yes. That is basically the way I envision this happening. And, you wouldn't just get THAT card. You would get EVERY Yogi Berra card we come across during the season. The advantage to claiming Yogi in your "Top 20" of course is that you lay claim now and don't have to wait. Well, assuming someone else didn't get him in the initial draft... It's a risk either way. After all, what if you claim him and we never see one, right? I haven't worked out the details on how the "name it/claim it" system will work, but that is the gist of it!
#3 - "...opened after the claim?" - No, if you lay claim to a player that is unclaimed, you will get EVERY card of that player during the break. So, even if you manage to wait until the very end to claim a player (that no one else has claimed) that you want, you will get EVERY one of his cards presented during the break (depending on "multiple players on one card" rules, etc).
As mentioned before, all unclaimed players at the end of the regular season will be randomly distributed among all the participants.
The important take-aways here:
1) You will be able to claim players throughout the season, no matter how many of your "Top 20" spots you fill.
2) You will be able to claim an unclaimed player during the season and will receive ALL of that player's cards.
As I said, I am still ironing out details of the rules, so questions like this help me do just that!
Great questions.
--David