Hockey card grading
Hockey has the roughest vintage production in the hobby and one of the tightest modern rookie designs. Here is what graders look for on O-Pee-Chee and Young Guns, and which cards actually earn back the fee.
Most vintage hockey was printed by O-Pee-Chee in Canada on cheaper stock and cut with less precision than the Topps equivalents. Rough, feathered edges and heavy off-centring are not defects on those cards — they are how the print run left the building. Whole sheets came out that way.
That has one important consequence: a high-grade O-Pee-Chee card is genuinely scarce, and the market prices it accordingly. The gap between an OPC card at a 7 and the same card at a 9 is far wider than the equivalent gap in baseball, because so few 9s exist to begin with.
At the modern end, Upper Deck's Young Guns have been the rookie card that matters since 1990–91, and their thin bordered design leaves nowhere for a centering error to hide.
Everything is scored against the same transparent 1–10 grading scale.
Probably not worth it: junk-era base cards from the late 1980s and 1990s, printed in enormous quantities, unless you are grading them to display. Work the numbers on the card grading cost page first.
Same rates as every other card we grade. Choose a tier on speed alone — the grade, the slab and the live tracking are identical across all four:
| Tier | Price per card | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk (100+ cards) | from $5 | 90 days |
| Premium | $7 | 30 days |
| Express | $9 | 10 days |
| Diamond | $15 | 2 days |
Sending a whole box or binder? Bulk grading starts at $5 a card and is quoted per submission. Shipping from Canada is covered on the international submissions page. See how we compare on our grading company comparison.
MPE grades hockey cards from $5 per card on Bulk submissions of 100 cards or more. The published self-serve tiers are $7 for 30-day Premium, $9 for 10-day Express and $15 for 2-day Diamond. Every tier gets the same expert grade and the same premium slab.
O-Pee-Chee printed on cheaper stock and cut sheets less precisely than Topps did, so rough, feathered edges and heavy off-centring are normal rather than exceptional. A high-grade O-Pee-Chee card is genuinely scarce, and that scarcity is why the ones that do grade well sell for so much more than their Topps equivalents.
It's assessed as a factory characteristic rather than handling damage, but it still affects the edge score because the grade describes the card in front of us. The distinction matters: a rough cut is judged against how that print run left the factory, whereas a crease or a nick is judged as damage that happened afterwards.
Centering first, because the thin border on the Young Guns design makes even a small shift obvious, and surface second. The card stock shows fingerprints and light scratches under grading lights that are invisible in a sleeve, and the black in the design exposes edge wear the way any dark border does.
Yes. Wax and gum residue transferred from pack wrappers is a surface flaw and is graded as one, even though it came from the factory packaging. It's very common on vintage O-Pee-Chee because the wax packs sat against the top and bottom cards in the stack.
Vintage rookies from the O-Pee-Chee era, Upper Deck Young Guns of players who went on to matter, patch autographs and low-numbered parallels, and any card where you already suspect the centering is unusually good. As a rule the card should be worth several times the grading fee before grading it as an investment.
