If you are holding a hockey card with the words Young Guns printed on it, here is the answer first. Young Guns is Upper Deck's rookie subset inside its flagship hockey product. It runs through Series 1, Series 2 and Extended Series, it has its own design that changes every year, and collectors treat it as the hockey rookie card. That is the definition. The rest of this decides whether the card in your hand is interesting or ordinary.
How to tell if the card in your hand is one
Simpler than the internet makes it look.
- The front says Young Guns. Not implied by the design. The words are printed on the card.
- It came out of the flagship set. Upper Deck Series 1, Series 2 or Extended Series. The season is on the back.
- Do not go by the design. The look changes every year, so one season's card will not match another season's. That is normal.
There is also a Canvas version of the Young Guns card, printed on different stock with its own card number. Same player, same subset, a separate card.
What it is not: a rookie card from another Upper Deck product. SP Authentic, Artifacts, O-Pee-Chee Platinum and Ultimate Collection all have their own rookie cards under their own names. None of them are Young Guns.
Rookie card, first card, or just a young player
This is where the confusion lives, and a good deal of it is deliberate. Three things get called the same thing.
A card of a young player. A player in his third season is still young. A card of him from that season is just a card. Being new to the league does not make a card a rookie card.
A first card. Plenty of players have cards printed before they played a game in the league, from junior and prospect products. Collectors call those prospect cards. Good to own, but earlier does not mean rookie.
A rookie card. The player's card in a widely available set at the start of his career in the league. That is the one the market agrees on, and the agreement is the whole point. It costs more than the rest because everybody is chasing the same card.
The word rookie printed on a card does not settle it. It is a label on a design, and labels get used loosely. Neither does the word in a listing title. Sellers lean on it because it moves a card that would not move on the player's name alone, and at the cheap end that happens constantly.
Nor is every rookie card worth chasing. Most players who get a card never become someone people collect. The rookie card of a player who never held a roster spot is still a rookie card and also a dollar card, both at once.
Where Series 1, Series 2 and Extended sit in one season
A season gets three flagship releases, in this order: Series 1, Series 2, Extended Series. Young Guns run through all three, and the card numbers climb with each release.
There is a practical reason for the split. A player who debuts after Series 1 has gone to print cannot be in it, so he turns up in Series 2. Debut later than that and he lands in Extended Series. That is why some of the names people want most sit in the back half of a season rather than the front, and it is why a Series 2 or an Extended Young Gun is not a lesser card. Same subset, later print run.
Extended is not only rookies. The Extended You-Pick we have up right now is UD3 and Canvas inserts of Matthews, Crosby and MacKinnon, veterans rather than first year players, and not a Young Gun in it.
What actually drives demand for one Young Gun over another
Three things, and none of them are predictions.
Who the player is. By a distance the biggest one. A Young Gun of a player people know draws buyers from everywhere. One of a player they do not draws whoever collects that team, which is a much smaller room.
How well known the subset is. Young Guns is the best known rookie subset in hockey, so there is almost always somebody looking for one, including at the cheap end. That is not true of most inserts.
Condition. Enough that it gets its own section.
What we will not do is tell you what any of it will be worth later. We do not know, and nobody telling you otherwise knows either.
Condition matters more here than on almost anything else
Young Guns get handled. Pulled from a pack and passed around the table, traded, carried in a backpack, put in a binder and taken back out again. A card that has been in circulation shows it.
Four things to look at:
- Corners. First to go. Handling rounds them, and it shows at arm's length once you know to look.
- Edges. Chipping reads as light flecks along the border, worst on dark designs.
- Surface. Tilt it under a lamp. Print lines and scratches hide until you do.
- Centering. The width of the border on each side. This one is different from the other three.
Centering was decided at the factory when the sheet was cut. It was off the moment the card existed, and no amount of careful storage fixes it afterwards. Two copies of the same card, one centered and one not, are two different cards to a buyer.
The photo on the listing is the card you get
Every card here is photographed front and back, and the photo on the listing is that exact card, never a stock image. On a subset where condition does this much of the work, that is the part that matters. You are looking at those corners and that centering before you pay, not after. If the card that arrives is not the card in the photo, tell us within 7 days and we make it right, refund or replacement, your call.
The Young Guns we have on the shelf right now
There are 20 Young Guns in stock, and they are not all from the same season.
One season and one series has its own page: 2021-22 Upper Deck Series 2 Young Guns Rookie Cards. That is 2021-22 Series 2 and nothing else. The rest sit in the shop alongside everything else, and across the whole shop 81 cards are in the rookies category, from several different products. So if you are chasing a player rather than the subset, look wider than any one page. The full shop is here.
Combined shipping is automatic, so five cards cost one shipping charge instead of five. We ship from Kelowna to anywhere in Canada, pickup in the Okanagan is free, and the rates are on the shipping page.
If you inherited a box of these and you are working out what you have, sort by set before you sort by player. The back tells you what a card is. The player tells you who wants it. Two separate jobs, and that order saves you an evening.
Questions about condition or how an order works are answered on the FAQ. If yours is not there, ask us.