Sports cards

Young Guns

Also written: YG · Young Gun

Upper Deck's rookie subset in its flagship NHL set — the rookie card hockey collectors actually chase.

ConceptVocabulary rather than a finish

Young Guns is the rookie subset inside Upper Deck's flagship NHL set. The cards use a distinct design from the rest of the set, carry the Young Guns wordmark on the front, and sit in their own card-number range at the end of each series.

It is the consensus hockey rookie card. A player can have rookie cards in several hockey products in the same year, and the market treats the Young Gun as the one that counts — which is why Young Guns of the same player routinely trade well above other rookie issues of the same season.

How to identify one

• The wordmark on the front and a design that differs from the rest of the base set.
• The card number. Young Guns occupy their own block of numbers rather than being scattered through the set.
• Which series. The flagship set ships in more than one series, and a player's Young Gun appears in exactly one of them. The series is part of the card's identity.

Young Guns have versions too

The subset is not a single card. Upper Deck runs the same Young Guns through the set's alternate subsets and scarcer treatments — including its canvas-stock version — and through serial-numbered and exclusive parallels. All of them are Young Guns; they are not the same card and do not carry the same price. Read the full parallel name after the dash in the set line before comparing anything.

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