As 2026-27 Hockey Card Year Begins, Upper Deck Continues Balancing Tradition With Innovation

ROSEMONT, Ill. — Over the years, Upper Deck has introduced tradition after tradition to hockey card collectors.

As the 2026-27 trading card year kicks off with today’s release of Upper Deck MVP — another of those annual staples collectors have come to expect — the company begins another year of straddling the line between the heritage it has built and the demands of the modern collector.

Upper Deck President Jason Masherah — who has worked at the company for more than two decades, including the last 13-plus as its president — has been entrusted with protecting iconic industry concepts like Young Guns and Future Watch, and he and his team put daily thought into how to best deliver for collectors.

“Our team spends an inordinate amount of time talking to shops, talking to collectors, watching breaks, and watching online chat rooms and social media groups to get a sense of when to freshen things up,” Masherah said from the 2026 National Sports Collectors Convention. “But it’s hard.

“One of the challenges in this industry right now is while the world is smaller because of online, the amount of different platforms spreads (collectors) out,” he said. “Having to keep track of all those different places collectors are becomes time consuming, but our team does a pretty good with it.”

Upper Deck, Masherah said, takes great care in developing everything from entry-level products like MVP to premium brands like The Cup and everything in between. He illustrated the company’s general approach with the evolution of Young Guns rookie cards, which are arguably the most anticipated base rookie cards in any sport.

“We talk about Young Guns probably on a daily basis because it’s the most recognized rookie card in the hobby,” Masherah said of a concept that had an unheralded debut in 1990-91. “You need chase, but you don’t want to water it down. For a long time, Young Guns had the Exclusives numbered to /100 (YG debut in 1999-00) and the High Gloss numbered to /10 (debut in 2003-04), and the question was, ‘Do we stick with that heritage forever, or do we try to do something new and different that more resembles the modern collector?

“We added the Outburst parallels (in 2023-24), but we only added three levels because we didn’t want to go crazy with 60 parallels,” he said. “What we’ve seen is that having restraint has actually paid off dramatically.”

He said having only eight total Young Guns cards per player makes completing a rainbow an achievable task. Even collectors who can’t manage to secure the 1/1 Outburst Gold can still make a realistic run at the other cards, which also include an unnumbered Outburst Silver and Outburst Red (/25). Additional non-Outburst parallels are Deluxe (/250), which also debuted in 2023-24, and unnumbered Clear Cut acetate parallels, which debuted in 2016-17.

But it’s not just Young Guns that capture gobs of internal attention.

Two brands that will help close out the 2025-26 hockey card year demonstrate Upper Deck’s innovation and care. Upper Deck Tableau is a completely new brand that is photo-focused and has the potential to quickly become a collector favorite, and Splendor returns as a standalone product for the first time since 2017-18, a decision Masherah described as very intentional after sprinkling Splendor cards throughout other high-end products for several years.

“Splendor is an interesting case study. The core tenant of Splendor is it’s very high end and the checklist is very small,” he said. “Because the checklist is very small, you don’t want to do that product every year because it would become very repetitive and it would hurt the value of other Splendor cards. … We’re very conscious of the value of those cards and making sure that those cards stay desirable over time.

“It’s very scientific how we treat that brand.”

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