A weekend with two UFC legends: Tom Aspinall and Mighty Mouse stream with 3rd Down

I'm writing this a couple of days later and I still can't quite believe the weekend actually happened.

Tom Aspinall on Saturday. Demetrious Johnson on Sunday. Back to back. Both walking into our sports hall to rip UFC cards on stream with us. Written down like that it almost reads as a wind-up — and honestly, even now, going through the footage and the photos, parts of it still feel like they happened to someone else.

The Saturday walk-in was the first jolt. The doors went, and there was Tom — interim heavyweight champion of the UFC — strolling into our sports hall with his dad and his entourage like it was the most normal thing in the world. I've watched him fight on pay-per-view. I've watched him on the main card. And now he's ten feet away, asking where he should sit. Completely surreal.

Sunday somehow topped it. When Demetrious Johnson walked through the same doors, I genuinely didn't know what to do with myself. I've watched every single one of his fights — every one. From the WEC days, right through his title reign in the UFC, into ONE Championship. Across all of it he always came across as laid back, grounded, the kind of fighter you'd actually want to meet in real life. And then he was just there, in our sports hall, smiling and shaking hands, ready to open packs. He was exactly the guy I'd watched on screen for over a decade — and being in the same room as him still hasn't fully landed for me.

Two completely different energies. Saturday was cool and calm — Tom dialled in, quietly switched on, heavyweight presence without the showmanship. Sunday was bouncy and bubbly — DJ smiling, chatty, lifting the whole room before the camera even turned on.

Saturday: Tom Aspinall 

We cracked open a full Breaker's Delight case of 2026 Topps Chrome UFC on Saturday morning with Tom, and the moment you sit a fighter down in front of his own product, the conversation shifts. Think about it for a second: Tom was sitting at our table opening cards from a box with his own face on the front of it, with a genuine chance of pulling his own cards out of the packs — including autos that he'd signed months earlier, before the product had even hit the shelves. Cards he'd signed in a stack, blind, and then forgotten about. Now they're sealed inside packs in front of him, and he might pull one out himself. That's a kind of full-circle moment most people in the hobby will never get to see, never mind experience. It's properly mad when you sit with it. For anyone not deep in the UFC card world yet, Topps Chrome UFC is the flagship chromium product covering the roster — base cards, refractors numbered down to the rare parallels, rookie cards for the new wave of fighters, and the auto and patch hits that drive the secondary market. A Breaker's Delight case configuration is built for streams like this: enough packs to keep the action rolling, enough hit potential to keep everyone leaning in.

What a lot of people might not realise is that Tom came in pretty fresh to the trading card world. He told us early on that he hadn't really been around the hobby himself — the closest he'd got to it was his kids collecting Manchester City cards at home. So before we got cracking, the 3rd Down team sat down with him and ran through the basics. What a hobby box is, what a case looks like, what makes a refractor different from a base card, what a numbered parallel means, and — crucially — how a break actually works. Who buys into a break, how slots get allocated, how randomisers work, why the room gets so loud when a certain card comes out.

Before we got too far in, Tom called a couple of shots of his own. He predicted that a GSP card and an Islam Makhachev card would show up out of the packs. The Islam one came good — but with a twist. It didn't surface as a finished card; it came out as a redemption, the slip of cardboard you send back to Topps to claim the actual card once it's ready. Always a bit of a mixed feeling when a redemption drops in a break — you know the hit is real, you just have to wait for it. The GSP prediction was the more interesting one, though. Tom said on stream that if a GSP card did show up, he might just have to keep it for himself. Luckily for everyone involved, we never had to find out how serious he was, because no GSP appeared the whole way through the case. Probably for the best.

The moment that's going to live with this case break came a handful of packs in. Tom pulled a Mick Parkin card — fellow British heavyweight, training partner, friend — and the reaction wasn't put on. He immediately got his phone out on stream, took a picture of the card, and texted Parkin. The reply came back almost instantly. "Frame it." That was it,  the whole exchange happening live on our channel. This is exactly why streaming with sports stars works for the hobby — you don't get manufactured content, you get the actual relationships between athletes playing out over a pack of cards. It just happens when the right people sit down at the table. The Parkin card itself is the kind of pull that means more to the people involved than its market value will ever say. That's part of the magic of cardboard.

While Tom was on stream pulling for the audience, his dad and the rest of his entourage were also working through packs in the background. The whole crew, fingers on foil, looking for a hit. And here's where the trading card gods clearly had a sense of humour. Across the entire Saturday session, with all of them ripping, the only person who pulled a Tom Aspinall card was Tom's dad. Not Tom. Not the chat. Not us. His dad. You couldn't write it. If you've ever opened a case looking for your PC guy and walked away with everyone else, you understand exactly how that ended.

After the pack openings, Charlie (@aces_sportscards) put the question to him. "Tom, what's the biggest sale of one of your cards?" The shock on his face was the first answer. The cheeky comment that followed was the second. We're not going to spoil the number here — head over to the 3rd Down Instagram (@3rddownuk) to see exactly how much Tom Aspinall's most expensive card sold for, and his reaction when he said it out loud. It's worth the click. What we will say: it's the kind of figure that should change how casual viewers think about UFC cards as an asset class. The top of the UFC market — championship-era rookie autos, low-numbered patch hits, key fighter 1/1s — is in serious territory. Tom's own number on Saturday was a useful reminder that this hobby has grown up.

Once the ripping was done and the case was finished, we rolled into the seminar portion of the day — and that's where things took one final turn. A punching bag machine was set up in the corner for Tom. He stepped up, planted, and threw one shot. 999. First punch. The reading on the machine barely needed checking, because the noise the bag made when his glove landed on it told you everything — it didn't sound like a punching bag at all, it sounded like a gunshot going off somewhere outside. Heads turned. He gave it two more goes. Both came back 999 as well. Three straight 999s, the first one announced by a noise the room genuinely wasn't ready for.

Sunday: Demetrious Johnson

Sunday morning we did it again — this time with Demetrious Johnson. Mighty Mouse needs no introduction. Long-reigning UFC Flyweight Champion, ONE Championship World Grand Prix winner, and on most honest lists the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in MMA history. For UFC card collectors, his rookie and championship-era cards are foundational pieces — the kind of cardboard people build collections around.

The minute DJ sat down at the table the conversation went sideways into Marvel. Umar and DJ got deep into Spider-Man villains, who ranked where, who was underrated, the whole thing. It was the kind of opening you don't get on a scripted segment. Once we did get into the cards, DJ opened a hobby box of Topps Chrome UFC and the brand-new Topps UFC Midnight — first time a lot of viewers had seen Midnight ripped on stream, and it didn't disappoint. Before he started, DJ called his shot. "I'm pulling a Charles Oliveira auto." A few packs later, out it came — a Charles Oliveira patch auto numbered /99. The room lost it. Called it into existence. DJ pumped about the pull.

One thing that became obvious within about five minutes of DJ ripping his first pack: this man is built for content. Since hanging the gloves up he's moved into the content-creator world full-time, and you could see it instantly on stream. The flow was effortless. Every fighter's card that came out got a beat — a stat, a story from a card he'd been on, a take on how that fighter's stock is moving, who they should be matched up with next. He didn't go quiet on a single card. And every time a Raul Rosas Jr. card surfaced — base, refractor, didn't matter — he'd reel off "Chiwiwi" without missing a beat, every single time. That's the difference an active content creator makes to a stream like this — it never lulls, the audience never has dead air, and the cards themselves become a jumping-off point rather than the whole conversation.

The part of the stream every UFC collector should rewind for came shortly after. DJ broke down, from a fighter's perspective, exactly how the match-worn material ends up on the cards we open. He explained that Topps will email or phone a fighter directly and ask if they'll send over a piece of kit from a previous fight — shorts, gloves, walkout gear. The fighter ships it in. Topps cuts the material into small patches that get embedded in the cards. Then — and this part surprised a lot of people in the chat — they send the rest of the clothing back to the fighter. It's not all consumed. The fighters keep the bulk of their own gear. He also walked us through how the autographs work. Fighters don't sign individual cards one at a time. They sit down to a signing session and sign a stack of stickers in one go — hundreds at a time, sometimes more — which Topps then applies to the cards during production. It's why you'll sometimes see slight variation in the placement of an auto sticker on the same card from different packs. For anyone who's only ever opened the finished product, hearing the process explained by a fighter who's actually been on both ends of it was genuinely one of the highlights of the weekend. It's the kind of education the hobby needs more of.

One thing we already knew going into Sunday was that DJ wasn't on the checklist for the sets we were ripping. We worked our way through the boxes anyway, and sure enough — no DJ. No base, no insert, no auto. After we'd wrapped a few boxes, the conversation turned to it properly, and DJ thought about it for a minute before pulling out his phone and firing off a message to his contacts at Topps. The ask was simple: any chance of getting on the checklist for the next set? Watch this space. If the greatest flyweight in history wants in on the next Topps UFC release, we'd back him to get it. We'll be ripping it when it lands either way.

Looking Back On It

Honestly, it still hasn't sunk in. I keep going back to the footage and catching myself thinking did that actually happen here, in our sports hall, on a normal weekend. Tom Aspinall on Saturday. Demetrious Johnson on Sunday. Two world-level UFC fighters, sat at our table, ripping packs alongside the team and the breakers, throwing themselves into the hobby like they'd been doing it for years.

It was the kind of weekend you don't get to plan for properly because you can barely believe it's coming, and then it shows up, and then it's gone, and you spend the next few days trying to put it back together in your head. Everything about it landed. The walk-ins. The packs. The reactions. The conversations between rips. The chat is going off in real time. The team being exactly what they always are — calm, ready, on it. 

We also walked away with a couple of pieces of cardboard we're never letting go of. As part of the breaks, Tom signed an empty box for us at the end of Saturday, and DJ signed an empty pack at the end of Sunday. No hits. No autographs of fighters we were chasing in the packs. Just the box and the wrapper — the actual product they sat down in front of and ripped with us — signed by the people who tore them open. Souvenirs in the truest sense. Those are getting framed, getting displayed.

To Tom, to DJ, to both of their teams, and to everyone on our side who made the weekend happen — thank you. We don't say that lightly. This was a landmark weekend for the 3rd Down channel, for UFC cards in the UK, and personally for me. We'll be telling people about it for a long time.