A Short Print, A Legend: The Story of Upper Deck Young Guns

Few subsets in the entire trading card hobby command the kind of cross-generational respect that Upper Deck's Young Guns enjoy in hockey. No autograph. No serial number. No swatch of game-worn jersey. Just a short-printed base card in the flagship Upper Deck Hockey release — and somehow, that simple formula has produced some of the most coveted rookie cards ever printed. At NordSlab, Young Guns slabs are a cornerstone of what we move week after week, so we thought it was time to walk through the full arc: from a quiet 1990-91 debut nobody paid attention to, all the way to today's Macklin Celebrini chase.

Humble beginnings: 1990-91 to 1992-93

Upper Deck launched its first-ever hockey product in 1990-91, and tucked into the High Series of that flagship release was a small subset called Young Guns. At the time, it barely registered. Upper Deck's flagship set was already overflowing with rookie-focused subsets, and many collectors were more interested in World Junior Championships cards that captured prospects before their NHL debuts. Young Guns was just one of several places to find first-year players.

That inaugural 1990-91 Young Guns subset includes the rookie cards of two future Hall of Famers: Sergei Fedorov (#525) and Pavel Bure (#526). Both cards have aged beautifully — they're the foundational pieces of the entire Young Guns lineage, and high-grade copies still draw serious interest from vintage hockey collectors three and a half decades later. But in their day? Nobody was treating them as anything special. They got handled, stacked, and tossed in shoeboxes like every other card.

The subset hung on for two more seasons before Upper Deck quietly retired it after 1992-93. The first chapter of Young Guns ended without much fanfare.

The wilderness years: Collector's Choice and a long silence

After the 1994-95 NHL lockout, Upper Deck brought Young Guns back — but not where you'd expect. The 1995-96 and 1996-97 editions appeared in Collector's Choice, Upper Deck's budget brand. Two largely forgettable seasons later, the subset was shelved again. For most of the late 1990s, Young Guns simply did not exist.

It's worth pausing on this, because it tells you something about how unlikely the eventual rise of Young Guns really was. This was not a brand carefully cultivated over decades. It was a subset that started small, got cancelled, came back in a discount product, got cancelled again, and only resurfaced because somebody at Upper Deck decided to give it one more shot.

1999-00: the modern era begins

When Young Guns returned to the flagship Upper Deck Hockey release in 1999-00, something fundamental changed. This time, they were printed as short prints — harder to pull from packs than the rest of the base set — and the distinctive design language that collectors now recognize on sight began to take shape. The 1999-00 checklist included rookie cards for Roberto Luongo, Daniel Sedin, and Henrik Sedin, plus the introduction of UD Exclusives parallels numbered to 100.

From that moment on, Upper Deck never looked back. Every subsequent flagship release has built on the same template: short-printed rookies, instantly recognizable design, parallels that scale up in rarity. The 2000-01 set added the Ilya Kovalchuk, Dany Heatley, and Rick DiPietro rookies. 2002-03 gave us Rick Nash, Henrik Zetterberg, and Jay Bouwmeester. 2003-04 brought Eric Staal, Marc-André Fleury, Ryan Suter, and Patrice Bergeron.

By the early 2000s, Young Guns had quietly become the default answer when someone asked "what's the rookie card?" for an emerging NHL star.

2005-06: the watershed year

If one season vaulted Young Guns from popular subset to hobby institution, it was 2005-06. The lockout that wiped out the 2004-05 NHL season delivered a once-in-a-generation double-rookie class, and the two faces of that class were both featured: Sidney Crosby (#201) and Alexander Ovechkin (#443).

The Crosby Young Guns is, by consensus, the modern hockey card that did the most to establish the format. It's not Crosby's rarest rookie — that distinction belongs to his 2005-06 SP Authentic Future Watch Auto and The Cup RPA — but it's the one collectors line up for first. PSA has graded the card hundreds of times, with Gem Mint 10s consistently moving in the four-figure range, and even raw copies in clean condition continue to hold real value. The Ovechkin from the same set is a perfect complement and frequently traded alongside it.

The same 2005-06 release also contains the Young Guns rookies of Henrik Lundqvist, Corey Perry, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, and Mike Richards. It is, arguably, the deepest single Young Guns checklist ever produced. Boxes that sat on hobby shop shelves for $80 in 2005 now sell sealed for thousands.

2005-06 also coincided with another structural shift: it was the first season of Upper Deck's NHL exclusive license. That exclusivity — which has held with only a brief Panini window from 2010-11 to 2013-14 — has been a major driver of the brand's continuing dominance.

Stars of the 2006-2014 era

The decade following 2005-06 produced a remarkable run of Young Guns rookies. A short list of the heavy hitters:

• 2006-07: Evgeni Malkin, Anze Kopitar, Jordan Staal, Phil Kessel
• 2007-08: Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Carey Price, Nicklas Backstrom — another stacked class that's often discussed in the same breath as 2005-06
• 2008-09: Steven Stamkos, Drew Doughty, Erik Karlsson, Tyler Myers
• 2009-10: John Tavares, Victor Hedman, Matt Duchene
• 2010-11: Taylor Hall, Tyler Seguin, Jeff Skinner, P.K. Subban
• 2013-14: Nathan MacKinnon, Seth Jones, Aleksander Barkov, Filip Forsberg
• 2014-15: Leon Draisaitl, Aaron Ekblad, William Nylander, David Pastrnak

The 2007-08 Toews, Kane, and Price Young Guns deserve special mention. All three players have built Hall of Fame résumés, and the Chicago duo in particular benefited from three Stanley Cup runs that kept demand burning for years.

2015-16: the McDavid card

Then came Connor McDavid. The 2015-16 Upper Deck Young Guns Connor McDavid rookie card (#201) is, in many ways, the spiritual successor to the 2005-06 Crosby. Upper Deck reportedly printed an elevated quantity of McDavid Young Guns anticipating massive demand, and they were absolutely right — the card has been graded by PSA in volumes that dwarf almost any other modern hockey card. Population reports show thousands of PSA 10s in circulation.

That high population has kept the McDavid Young Guns more accessible than the Crosby, but it remains one of the most actively traded modern hockey cards on the planet. The same release also delivered the Jack Eichel Young Guns — a card whose value has had its ups and downs but remains a key piece for any modern hockey collection.

2016-17 through 2019-20: the modern superstars

Each of these seasons produced at least one heavyweight Young Guns rookie:

• 2016-17: Auston Matthews (#201) — the franchise Maple Leaf, with the Toronto premium attached. Patrik Laine and Mitch Marner round out a deep top tier.
• 2017-18: Mathew Barzal, Brock Boeser, Clayton Keller
• 2018-19: Elias Pettersson, Rasmus Dahlin — Pettersson's card was on a meteoric trajectory before some market cooling
• 2019-20: Cale Makar, Jack Hughes, Kaapo Kakko, Quinn Hughes (extended series), Dominik Kubalik

The 2019-20 Cale Makar Young Guns deserves a callout. Makar has rapidly established himself as one of the best defensemen of his generation — a Norris Trophy, a Stanley Cup, and Conn Smythe in 2022. His Young Guns rookie has become one of the most respected defenseman rookies in the hobby, and high-grade copies command real premiums.

The 2020s: COVID-era prints and a hobby reset

The 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons landed in the middle of the trading card boom triggered by the pandemic. Print runs, demand patterns, and grading submissions all spiked in ways the hobby hadn't seen in decades. Notable Young Guns from this stretch:

• 2020-21: Kirill Kaprizov, Alexis Lafrenière, Quinton Byfield, Tim Stützle
• 2021-22: Trevor Zegras, Lucas Raymond, Moritz Seider, Cole Caufield
• 2022-23: Matty Beniers, Owen Power, Wyatt Johnston

The Kaprizov Young Guns from 2020-21 is one of the great sleeper success stories of recent years — he won the Calder, became a perennial scoring leader, and his card values reflect it. Cole Caufield is a particularly interesting case for Quebec-adjacent collectors given his Montreal Canadiens ties.

2023-24: Connor Bedard arrives

The 2023-24 Connor Bedard Young Guns (#451, found in Series 2) is the most recent card to genuinely capture the broader hobby's attention the way Crosby and McDavid did. PSA has already graded the card in massive volumes — nearly 13,000 submissions and counting — which speaks to just how heavily this rookie was anticipated and chased.

Bedard arrived in Chicago carrying expectations that would crush most prospects. His rookie season saw him put up Calder-winning numbers on a rebuilding roster, and the Blackhawks' history of producing card-friendly stars (Toews, Kane) gave him an immediate cultural fit. Whether Bedard becomes the next franchise-defining star or settles into a tier just below remains one of the most-watched stories in hockey collecting.

2024-25 and beyond: Celebrini and the next wave

The 2024-25 Upper Deck Series 2 release features the Macklin Celebrini Young Guns rookie. Celebrini went first overall to the San Jose Sharks in the 2024 NHL Draft and immediately stepped into a top-line role. As the next "consensus number one" prospect after Bedard, his Young Guns is the headline chase card of the current cycle.

The 2024-25 Series 1 release also included Young Guns of late-2023-24 call-ups like Logan Stankoven, Cutter Gauthier, Frank Nazar, and Lane Hutson — the Habs' undersized defenseman who has rapidly become a fan favorite in Montreal and whose card has built a passionate following in Quebec specifically.

The 2025-26 Series 1 just released earlier this NHL season, with the heavy 2025 draft class (Schaefer, Hagens, Misa, Frondell, Eklund, Martone, and others) scheduled to appear in upcoming Series 2 and Extended Series products.

Why Young Guns matter

Step back from any individual card and the bigger picture comes into focus. Young Guns work because they sit in a rare sweet spot:

• Universally recognized as the rookie card. Across the hobby — Beckett, PSA registries, eBay, hobby shops — Young Guns is the default flagship rookie for an NHL player. No competing card series has been able to displace that status.
• Short-printed but attainable. They fall roughly 1:4 hobby packs. Rare enough that pulling one feels like a win; common enough that you can actually build a set or chase specific players without high-end budgets.
• No autograph, no jersey patch — just a card. That simplicity is a feature. There's no auto to fade, no patch to argue about, no sticker peeling off in 20 years. A Young Guns from 1990 still looks like a Young Guns.
• Condition sensitivity creates real grading value. The dark borders on many designs are punishing on chipping. Centering issues are common. PSA 10s and BGS 9.5s carry massive premiums over raw copies, which keeps an active grading and resale market alive for every meaningful player.
• A genuine multi-generational catalog. From Bure and Fedorov in 1990, through Crosby and Ovechkin, through McDavid and Matthews, through Bedard and Celebrini — Young Guns is one of the only modern card properties with an unbroken thread connecting four decades of hockey.

Building a Young Guns collection

For collectors thinking about where to start, a few practical thoughts from our side of the counter:

Focus on condition. The Young Guns design has evolved over the years, but most editions feature dark borders, foil accents, or both — all of which expose flaws under grading. A raw copy that looks "mint" to the eye is often a PSA 8 or 9 once it's slabbed. If you're buying for the long term, paying up for a verified PSA 10 or BGS 9.5 is usually worth it.

Don't overlook the supporting cast. Everyone wants the McDavid or the Crosby. But the 2007-08 Toews and Kane, the 2009-10 Tavares, the 2019-20 Cale Makar, the 2020-21 Kaprizov — these are cards that have built strong, defensible value because the players became elite. Identifying the "next Makar" in a current Young Guns class is where the real upside lives.

Watch the parallels. Modern Young Guns come with a range of parallels — Exclusives, High Gloss, Outburst, Canvas, Clear Cut, and rarer one-of-ones. For elite players these parallels can be exponentially more valuable than the base card, and they're often where the most serious collectors focus.

Know what's already in circulation. Population data matters. The PSA and BGS pop reports tell you how many copies of a given grade exist, and that directly drives the premium between, say, a PSA 9 and a PSA 10. At NordSlab we track this data closely on every slab we list, and we'd encourage every collector to do the same.

The bottom line

From a quiet 1990-91 debut nobody noticed, through two cancellations, through a 1999-00 reinvention that nobody could have predicted would become hobby canon — Upper Deck Young Guns is one of the great accidental institutions in modern sports cards. Every NHL season now begins with the same ritual: collectors waiting to see who lands which Young Guns spot, ripping packs, watching pop reports, deciding which rookies are worth chasing for the long haul.

If you're new to hockey cards, Young Guns is the doorway. If you're a serious collector, it's probably the spine of your collection. And if you're somewhere in between, you're in good company.

At NordSlab, we're constantly cycling through Young Guns slabs across every era — from the vintage Bure and Fedorov pieces to the latest Celebrini and Hutson chase cards. Check the store for current inventory, or reach out if you're hunting something specific. The Young Guns market moves fast, and we love being part of it.

Have a favorite Young Guns design or rookie? Drop us a line — we'd love to hear what you're chasing.