(Weird, I heard Pride turned down this exact same trade.)

I’ll admit it: I collected baseball cards as a kid.  We all did.  It was cheap, fun, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.  You could trade them with unsuspecting younger brothers and obsessively check their worth in the handy Beckett guides.  It was basically the elementary school stock market, only girls weren’t interested so it was more like the stock market in 1890.

I only bring this up now because Topps is releasing its first line of UFC cards in January of 2009 and I’m wondering, are MMA-loving adults the market for this, or do kids still care about trading cards now that they have cell phones and the Wii and overly sensitive stepfathers?

The cards look great, but it’s hard to imagine myself, now an adult (at least legally), buying some.  I’ve long since given up the dream that everyone’s mom but mine will throw them away, resulting in them becoming valuable collector’s items, like these bad boys.  I guess my question is, is the kind of thing the UFC thinks I’ll actually buy, the way TapouT somehow thinks I’ll buy an Octagon-shaped bed?  Or is this the kind of thing they think the children who I’m always chasing off my lawn will buy?

Also, of the 100 cards being offered in the first set, ninety are actual fighters and the remainder is made up of, according to the press release: “a mix of personalities such as Dana White and the Octagon Girls.”  Man, if I buy a pack hoping for that Georges St. Pierre rookie card and I a get one of Dana White leaning against a cage in a partially unbuttoned dress shirt, no amount of free gum is going to placate me.