Young Guns Connor McDavid Expected to Boost Upper Deck Hockey

The Young Guns will be out in force on November 5 with the release of 2015-16 Upper Deck Series One hockey. Upper Deck has released its checklist (see below) and is touting that Series One will contain “the best class of Young Guns Rookies since 2005-06.”

That 2005-06 set featured the Young Guns rookie card of Sidney Crosby.  The 2015-16 product will boast the first fully licensed (by the NHL and its players association) Young Guns card of Edmonton Oilers rookie Connor McDavid. That leads off the 50-card subset at card No. 201; the final card (No. 250) will pair McDavid with Calgary’s Sam Bennett. In between, collectors can find cards of Arizona’s Max Domi, Winnipeg’s Andrew Copp and Boston’s Malcolm Subban.

Upper Deck, running on a tight deadline, conducted an interactive vote in which fans voted on the image for McDavid’s Young Guns card.  After McDavid’s regular-season debut on October 8, several images were nominated for fans to choose. The results are evident in Series One.

The Young Guns will be seeded one in every four packs.

A hobby box of 2016-16 Upper Deck Series One Hockey will contain 24 packs, with eight cards to a pack. There will be 200 cards in the base set. Parallels in the base set will include Exclusives numbered to 100 and High Gloss Spectrum versions numbered to 10.

Upper Deck notes that in a typical hobby box, a collector on average will pull six Young Guns, four UD Canvas cards, four UD Portraits, four Shining Stars (including one Royal Blue parallel) and one game jersey card with a larger swatch than in previous years.

The Canvas cards that feature Young Guns will fall one in every 48 packs, or one in every other hobby box on average. Otherwise, there are 120 cards in the Canvas subset, with Sabres rookie Jack Eichel the main draw among the Young Guns. Eichel is not part of the base set for Series One, but most likely will be part of the Series Two product early next year.

Inserts will include Clear Cut Acetate cards and Shining Stars. The latter will feature centers (every 16 packs), left and right wingers (one per hobby box), Legends (one in every 48 packs) and Royal Blue parallels for centers, wingers and Legends.

The Portraits will feature base subjects, legends and rookies, with gold and Platinum Blue parallels for each. A red parallel will be featured in packs sold at Toys “R” Us stores.

Scarcer cards will be the Piece of History relics and autographed relics. The 300 Win Club will highlight goalies like Terry Sawchuk, John Vanbiesbrouck and Marc-Andre Fleury. Gracing the 500 Goal Club relics will be stars like Mike Modano, Mats Sundin and Teemu Selanne; 1,000 Point Club cards will include Mike Bossy, Darryl Sittler and Phil Esposito.

But as always, the lure for this set will be the Young Guns. It’s been an Upper Deck staple since it returned to the set during the 1999-2000 season, and this year’s crop of rookies gives hockey collectors a good reason to chase the annual insert set.

Click here to buy 2015-16 Upper Deck Series One Hockey boxes.

2015-16 NHL Upper Deck Series 1 Checklist 

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About Bob D'Angelo

Bob has been a sportswriter and copy editor for more than 35 years and a blogger for a decade. He is celebrating his 50th year of card collecting, and still counts his 1965 Topps Mickey Mantle as his favorite. You can reach him at [email protected].