When You Start at the Top, There’s Only One Way to Go.
This past weekend, I set up at the Chicago Sports Spectacular to sell hockey cards and t-shirts. The Spectacular is a twice-annual, three-day show with around 400 vendors and dozens of autograph guests. The show draws a large crowd, and many in the crowd were wearing Blackhawks jerseys with Connor Bedard’s name and number 98 on the back.
The March Chicago Sports Spectacular was the first major Chicago-area show since Bedard’s Young Guns card was released in 2023-24 Upper Deck Series 2 on March 6 – and as you probably have guessed, everyone was talking about him.
At least half of the people who stopped by my booth asked if I had any Bedard cards, though many of them were looking specifically for his Young Guns card. And some even offered to sell me a Bedard Young Guns card, usually asking around $500 to $600. I could have bought that card ten times over.
But I didn’t.
As much as I like to make fun of people who need to check the “COMPS!” for everything they buy, the reality of Bedard’s Young Guns card is that the price of it has steeply and steadily declined over the past two weeks. On March 6, the first sale of it on eBay was for $1,200. Throughout the day, the card gradually declined in price, settling to around $900 or so.
Over the next week, the card further fell in price to around $800, then $700, then $600, and then $500. By the weekend of the show – March 15 to 17 – the price of Bedard’s Young Guns cards on eBay already started to dip to around $450.
On Monday, two more copies of his Young Guns card sold on eBay for $425 and $400. Yesterday, another Bedard Young Guns card sold at a “Best Offer” of $389. Today, one sold with a “Buy It Now” of $425.
Do we see a trend here?
As more and more hobby boxes, blaster boxes, mega boxes, hanger boxes, and collector tins of Series 2 are opened, more and more Bedard Young Guns enter the market. The card is very much in demand, but it is by no means in short supply. And the supply is still growing.
Another reason why sales prices of the Bedard Young Guns card were so high that first week was because flippers wanted to buy the card, have it graded (at the rush service price, naturally), hope that it gets a grade of “10”, and then sell it at a huge profit. As of today, there have been over 30 eBay sales (in the U.S. and in Canada) of the Bedard Young Guns card graded at a PSA 10. One PSA 10 Bedard Young Guns sold for $10,124.63 ($7,482.54 USD) on eBay Canada on March 17, but seems to currently average around $3,500 CDN or $2,500 USD.
Once enough Bedard Young Guns cards graded at PSA 10 enter the market, the prices of those will decline too, and graders and/or flippers will have most likely moved onto something else that they believe is more worthwhile. After all, baseball season is just one week away, and the new baseball cards have already started to come out.
Hopefully, that will give us real hockey collectors a chance to get a Bedard Young Guns card for a more-reasonable price.
Note: This article was updated with additional information from eBay Canada.
Note: This article is an updated version of an editorial that originally appeared in Volume 2 – Issue 12 of the Puck Junk Newsletter. For stories like these, plus news and updates about hockey cards and collectibles, subscribe to the newsletter here.
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