Some hockey cards spike for a season and fade. A few become the card a whole sport measures itself against. The 2005-06 Upper Deck Series 1 Sidney Crosby Young Guns is the second kind. Twenty years in, it is still the rookie every modern hockey collector wants, and it has never given up the crown.
This set arrived right as the NHL came back from a lost season, and Upper Deck happened to be holding the most hyped rookie in a generation.
The Card That Set the Bar
The Crosby Young Guns is card #201, and it is the whole reason this set still matters. Crosby walked into the league as the consensus next face of hockey and then actually delivered on it, which is rare. That combination of generational talent and a clean, iconic Young Guns design is why the card has held value better than almost anything else from the era.
The numbers back it up. A PSA 10 Crosby Young Guns is sitting around $4,400 in real sold comps. A PSA 9 runs about $1,709, and even a raw copy clears $1,123. Look at that spread for a second. The jump from raw to a 9 to a 10 is enormous, which tells you everything about how condition-sensitive this card is. Centering and edges on 2005-06 Upper Deck can be rough straight out of the pack. That is exactly why the gem-mint premium is so steep, and why you do not gamble on raw here unless you know what you are looking at.
The Rest of the Class Pulled Its Weight
Crosby is the headliner, but the 2005-06 draft class was deep, and the Young Guns subset captured most of it. Corey Perry, Ryan Getzlaf, and Zach Parise all turned into long-term NHL players, and their rookies still carry respect even if they live in Crosby's shadow.
The gap is real, though. A PSA 10 Corey Perry from 2005 Upper Deck (#204) lands around $198, with raw copies near $23. Ryan Getzlaf (#452) sits close behind, roughly $135 in a PSA 10 and about $13 raw. Zach Parise (#206) comes in lower, around $80 graded and under $8 raw. These are not Crosby money, but they are the kind of cards you could have grabbed for the price of a sandwich a decade ago. Anyone who bought and graded early did well.
Where the Real Upside Hides
The base Young Guns are the obvious play, but the set goes deeper. The Young Guns Exclusives, numbered to 100, and the High Gloss parallels, numbered to 10, are genuine ghosts. A High Gloss Crosby almost never surfaces, and when one does, the price is whatever a serious collector is willing to write down that day. There is no comp because there is barely a market.
For collectors who want a piece of this set without spending Crosby-level money, the non-Young Guns base cards are the smart door in. Crosby's regular base from 2005 Upper Deck Victory (#285) is a clean example, around $287 in a PSA 10 and about $23 raw. You get a real 2005-06 Crosby with the same rookie-season pedigree, without the four-figure ticket. It is a way to own the era instead of just reading about it.
Should You Buy Now
If you have been circling a Crosby Young Guns, a PSA 9 is the sensible entry. You skip most of the gem-mint tax while still owning a graded copy of the most important modern hockey card. Crosby is still playing at a high level, and his standing in the sport only gets more secure with every season he adds to the resume. That floor under the card is not going anywhere.
The deeper cuts reward patience. A Perry or Parise rookie in a strong grade is cheap relative to the careers behind them, and the ultra-low-numbered Crosby parallels are the kind of long-term hold that pays off if you can ever pry one loose at a fair price. Either way, this is a set that earned its reputation the hard way and kept it. That does not happen by accident.