Young Guns Hockey Cards Value Guide: Most Valuable Rookies

Young Guns hockey cards are worth anywhere from a few dollars for a depth player to $6,000 or more for a PSA 10 Sidney Crosby, as of September 2026. The card's value depends on three things: the player, the grade, and whether it is the base Young Guns or a scarce parallel.

What are Upper Deck Young Guns?

Young Guns are the rookie card subset in Upper Deck's flagship NHL hockey set, and they have been the hobby's default hockey rookie card for more than two decades. Each Series 1 and Series 2 release includes a run of Young Guns cards, inserted at roughly one per hobby pack, that carry a silver Young Guns stamp and the player's first licensed NHL rookie card.

The subset debuted in 1990-91 Upper Deck with Sergei Fedorov and Pavel Bure, faded, and returned for good in 1999-00. Since then it has become, per Cardboard Connection's history of the set, one of the hobby's best non-autographed rookie cards. Part of that status is the NHL license: Upper Deck has held it exclusively for years, so there is no competing Topps or Panini rookie, and a player's Young Guns is simply his rookie card.

The other part is continuity. The stamp changes yearly but is always recognizable, the cards are not serial numbered, and the checklist is built around the players who debuted that season. That makes a Young Guns easy to collect and price, which is why it consistently outperforms serial-numbered rookies of the same player from Upper Deck's higher-end products.

How do you identify a Young Guns card?

You identify a Young Guns card by the silver "Young Guns" stamp on the front, the Upper Deck flagship design for that season, and the card number. In recent sets, Series 1 Young Guns occupy numbers 201 to 250 and Series 2 Young Guns occupy 451 to 500, so Crosby, McDavid and Matthews all sit at #201 and Bedard and Celebrini both sit at #451.

Those ranges are the fastest check. A card labeled a Young Guns with a number outside them is either from an older season with a different layout or not a Young Guns at all. Parallels such as Exclusives carry the same number as the base card.

Other markers to confirm:

• The words "Young Guns," "Upper Deck" and the player name on the front are printed in reflective foil, not flat ink.
• The back has the Upper Deck hologram in the lower right corner, with the registered trademark symbol beside it.
• The back lists junior or international stats, since the card is produced before or during his first NHL season.
• The design matches the base set for that year. A 2015-16 Young Guns looks like a 2015-16 base card with the stamp added.

If rookie designations are new to you, our guide on how to tell if a card is a rookie card explains why Young Guns count as true rookies while many other inserts do not.

Most valuable Young Guns cards

The most valuable Young Guns cards are the 2005-06 Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, the 2015-16 Connor McDavid, and, since 2026, the 2024-25 Macklin Celebrini. In PSA 10 the Crosby ranges from $6,000 to $10,000 or more and the Ovechkin and McDavid trade between $3,000 and $7,000, as of mid-2026.

The table below pairs each card with the most recent dated ranges available. PSA 10 figures come from Card Ladder sale records reported in 2026 and All Vintage Cards' Young Guns ranking; they are ranges, and a specific copy can land outside them depending on eye appeal and timing.

Two things stand out. The vintage-modern split matters less than in baseball or basketball, because every star has exactly one Young Guns and no competing rookie. And prices track the current season: Celebrini roughly quadrupled during 2026, Bedard fell by two thirds from his peak, and a playoff run or Hart Trophy season moves a card within weeks.

Connor Bedard Young Guns value

The Connor Bedard Young Guns, 2023-24 Upper Deck Series 2 #451, was worth about $200 raw and $510 to $675 in PSA 10 as of June 2026. That is a long way from its debut, when PSA 10 copies traded above $2,000 on release, and the decline is the clearest recent lesson in how hype and supply interact on a Young Guns.

Bedard's card carried the most anticipation of any Young Guns since McDavid, and the early price reflected buyers competing for the first graded copies. Then Series 2 kept shipping, the PSA population climbed, and Chicago's results did not add to the story. Puck Junk documented the slide as early as March 2024, and the card has drifted lower since.

That makes Bedard a reasonable entry point rather than a bargain. The raw card trades near $200, and at 2026 fees a PSA 10 at $510 to $675 barely clears a submission, so grading a raw Bedard is a poor bet unless the copy is exceptional. The card's value now depends on Bedard's next two or three seasons far more than on the hobby.

Macklin Celebrini Young Guns value

The Macklin Celebrini Young Guns, 2024-25 Upper Deck Series 2 #451, was worth $1,900 to $2,200 in PSA 10 as of August 2026, up from $400 to $500 a year earlier. The card became the center of the hockey market when a one-of-one parallel of it set a record for any non-Gretzky hockey card.

That parallel, a 2024-25 Young Guns Outburst Gold 1/1 authenticated by PSA, sold for $1.281 million at Goldin in August 2026, as reported by Sports Collectors Daily. It passed the previous highs for McDavid, Crosby and Ovechkin cards, and only the 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Gretzky rookie, which sold privately for $5.2 million in 2021, remains above it in hockey.

A 1/1 record does not set the base card's price, but it pulls attention and money toward every version. Base PSA 10 comps moved from around $1,236 earlier in 2026 to $1,900 to $2,200 by August, and the Silver Foil parallel in PSA 10 drew bids near $3,800 to $4,100. Whether that holds depends on Celebrini's production and on how many gem copies keep arriving from a set still being opened.

What is a Young Guns PSA 10 worth?

A Young Guns PSA 10 is worth two to ten times the same card in PSA 9, and the multiple is larger for older seasons where clean copies are scarce. On the McDavid, a PSA 10 sold for $3,000 in July 2026 against about $1,237 for a PSA 9 in June, a multiple of roughly 2.4x. On the 2005-06 cards the multiple is wider because so few centered copies exist.

Young Guns gem rarely because of the print. The flagship is produced in volume, centering drifts across the sheet, and the corners chip easily. Series 1 has a reputation for off-center cards, and the Series 2 Ovechkin is a known centering problem. A copy that looks perfect in a top loader often measures outside PSA's 55/45 front tolerance; our post on what a PSA 10 requires covers every line of that standard.

Before grading a raw Young Guns:

1. Measure both axes of the front. Anything past 55/45 is a PSA 9 ceiling.
2. Check the corners under a loupe for whitening, which is the second most common miss.
3. Confirm the back is within 75/25, since Young Guns backs drift too.
4. Pull PSA 9 and PSA 10 sold comps and run them against roughly $100 in 2026 fees, using the framework in is card grading worth it in 2026.

At current fees, most Young Guns below about $150 raw do not justify a submission, and only star rookies with a clean copy clear the bar comfortably. A PSA-scale condition estimate from the SnapCard card grading app is a cheap first filter before you commit the fee.

Parallels and variants: Canvas, Exclusives, High Gloss and Outburst

Young Guns parallels multiply the number of versions of each rookie, and a few of them are worth many times the base card. Canvas Young Guns are a separate textured version with its own numbering. UD Exclusives are serial numbered to 100, High Gloss to 10, and Outburst is a newer foil parallel family whose Gold is a 1/1.

Because parallels share the base card's name and often its number, comps are easy to mix. A search for "Celebrini Young Guns PSA 10" returns base, Silver Foil and Outburst copies at prices thousands of dollars apart, and only the label and photo tell them apart. Confirm the exact parallel before trusting a comp. Our explainer on sports card terms like parallel, refractor and numbered covers the vocabulary.

The hierarchy, from most to least common: base, Canvas, Silver Foil and other unnumbered foils, Exclusives /100, Outburst colors, High Gloss /10, and the Outburst Gold 1/1. Jumbo and acetate versions from certain seasons are priced case by case. The base card is the liquid market; the parallels are where the records come from.

How to spot a fake Young Guns

Fake Young Guns exist mainly for the top five or six players, and the tells are consistent because the counterfeits are unauthorized reprints rather than careful forgeries. The foil on the front, the hologram on the back, and the color of the back's bottom-right corner give most of them away in seconds.

A detailed teardown of a fake 2005-06 Ovechkin by Sports Card Info lists the checks that apply across seasons:

• On a genuine card, "Young Guns," "Upper Deck" and the player name on the front are shiny foil. Reprints print them flat.
• The Upper Deck hologram in the back's lower right corner should be reflective, with the registered trademark symbol next to it. Fakes lack the symbol.
• A genuine back has a thin black diagonal line near the tip of that corner and a smooth gray field. Fakes show a pattern where the gray should be.
• Border shading on the back should look sprayed on. Fakes look printed.
• Compare the card side by side with any other Young Guns from the same year, since every card in the set was printed the same way.

A card that fails any of these is not worth arguing over. For a broader checklist covering print, stock and gloss, see how to spot fake sports cards. And when checking a stack of hockey rookies, scanning each with SnapCard identifies the card and pulls recent sale records from eBay, Goldin, Heritage, PWCC and Pristine, which tells you which cards deserve a closer look under the loupe.

Bottom line

Young Guns values run from a few dollars to five figures. The September 2026 top is Crosby at $6,000 to $10,000+ in PSA 10, then Ovechkin, McDavid and Celebrini at $2,000 to $7,000. Identify one by the foil stamp and card number, price it by parallel and grade, and expect a PSA 10 to bring two to ten times a PSA 9 because they rarely gem.