How OPMT Scores Work: LT, ST and MT Explained

Every card on OPMT carries three numbers from 0 to 100: an LT, an ST and an MT score. They are the backbone of the whole site — the Hot Deals page, the Long-Term Deals page and the Sell Signals page are all ranked by them. This post explains exactly how each one is calculated, because we believe a score you can't inspect is a score you shouldn't trust.

LT Score — the long-term fundamentals

The Long-Term score answers one question: how desirable is this card likely to be in a year or more, and can you get out when you want to? It is a weighted average of ten independent categories, each normalised to 0–100. The current default weights:

• Character popularity (20%) — the character's rank in the official popularity poll, scored in bands: Luffy 100, the rest of the top 10 78, #11–30 50, #31–100 40, everyone else 25. Bands rather than a straight line because that is how prices behaved: the median Luffy card gained 81% in fifteen weeks, the rest of the top 10 about a third, and from #11 down the gains flatten out.
• Pull rate (15%) — how many booster packs it takes, on average, to open one copy. A Manga rare that appears once in ~2,500 packs has a fundamentally capped supply; a common alt-art that drops every 250 packs does not. We research these rates manually for every special rarity and maintain them per set.
• Sales velocity (12%) — how fast the card actually trades over the last 30 and 90 days, measured against the typical velocity of its own rarity class. A Manga rare that sells twice a month is liquid for a Manga rare; comparing it against bulk-rare volume would be meaningless, so each class has its own baseline.
• Exit liquidity (10%) — how many days the current offer book would take to clear at the recent sales rate. A card that clears in a month scores full marks; a queue of a year or more scores near zero. A gain you cannot sell is a number on a screen.
• Resilience (10%) — how rough the ride has been over the last 180 days: the deepest fall from a peak, how often the price dropped 30% in a single day, and how many of those drops came back within two weeks. Because one card has few drops, each card is blended with its rarity tier — SPs almost never crash and always recovered; SECs crash more and mostly stay down.
• Rarity type (8%) — Manga and SSP score highest, then SP, Manga Event, Wanted Poster, Treasure Rare, Leader alt art, alt art and SEC.
• US/EU arbitrage (8%) — the card's TCGPlayer price versus its CardMarket price. When the US market pays 50% more for the same card, the European price historically tends to catch up rather than the other way around.
• Rarity relative value (7%) — is this card cheap or expensive compared to its peers, and does its sales velocity back that price up? Peers are cards of the same rarity, scaled by how much that rarity pays for characters as popular as this one — so a Luffy SP is compared with what top-character SPs cost, not with the average SP. EB02 Anime 25th Collection is compared only with itself.
• Set age (5%) — older sets stopped being printed long ago; new sets are still flooding the market with fresh supply.
• Price band (5%) — a light tilt toward the €100–500 range, which had the best odds of a big gain and the shallowest drawdowns in 2026.

Two design decisions matter here. First, every threshold is a smooth interpolation, not a hard step — a card with 26 listings scores almost the same as one with 25, instead of falling off a cliff. Second, class baselines use medians and trimmed means rather than plain averages, so one outlier card can't distort the baseline for every other card in its class.

ST Score — reading the offer book

The Short-Term score hunts for supply squeezes. Instead of looking at price history, it walks the actual list of current offers, cheapest first, and asks: how many copies would buyers need to absorb before the cheapest listing is 25% higher than today? And at the current, confidence-weighted sales velocity, how many days would that take?

A card with only four cheap copies between today's price and a +25% price level, which is selling every day, scores very high. A card with a wall of 300 evenly-priced copies scores near zero no matter how popular it is. The full 100 points break down into sales velocity (22), copies-to-+25% (18), the 7-day price trend (18), copies-to-+50% (14), estimated days to target (13), US/EU arbitrage (10) and scarcity (5).

One detail we're strict about: a card with zero recorded sales in 30 days gets zero velocity points and an infinite time-to-target. Illiquid cards with thin offer books can look like squeezes — they aren't, because nobody is buying.

MT Score — fundamentals meeting momentum

The Medium-Term score is a blend: 40% ST, 40% LT, and 20% from the card's 30-day price trend. It exists because the best medium-horizon opportunities are cards that are both fundamentally strong and already moving — a high LT score tells you what to hold for years, a high ST score what might pop this week, and MT sits deliberately in between.

What the scores are not

No score predicts the future. What they do is compress thousands of data points — offer books, detected sales, pull rates, cross-market prices — into a consistent, comparable ranking that would take hours to research per card by hand. We publish the full methodology in the guide, and Premium users can change every weight and build their own formula. Treat the scores as a research shortlist, not a buy button — and never invest money you can't afford to lose in cardboard, however beautiful.