How to Spot Hot Deals? 30 Days of Data, and What Buying All of Them Would Have Returned

The Hot Deals page shows the 50 cards with the highest Short-Term (ST) score — cards where the offer book is thin enough, and sales fast enough, that a price jump looks imminent. That's the theory. But how did it actually perform? We pulled the full history for the last 30 days (7 June – 7 July 2026) and checked every single card that appeared on the list.

What the last 30 days looked like

Across the 31 daily lists in the window, 266 distinct cards were featured at least once. The list refreshes twice a day, and turnover is significant — most cards appear for a handful of days, while genuine supply squeezes stay on the list for weeks as their price climbs.

Measured from each card's first appearance to its price today (cheapest listed NM English copy, in both cases): 123 cards are up, 71 are down, and 72 are flat. The average featured card gained about 32% — but the median card is flat, which tells you something important: Hot Deals returns are driven by a minority of big winners, not by every pick going up a little.

The biggest gainers

These are the top featured cards by price change from the day they first entered the Hot Deals list to today:

The Teach case is worth dissecting, because it shows exactly what the ST score is built to catch. It entered the list on 7 June at €1.50 with a thin offer book, and appeared on the list 21 times over the month while the cheapest copy climbed step by step: €1.99 → €2.99 → €10 → €28 → €40, with only 9 copies listed today. That is a textbook supply squeeze — every cheap copy that sold moved the floor up, and there was never enough new supply to refill it. The honest caveat: with so few copies listed, the "price" is whatever the last remaining sellers ask. You could not have bought 50 copies at €1.50 — but you could have bought one or two, and the squeeze was visible on day one.

It cuts both ways. The worst featured cards lost 70–99% — mostly penny cards where the cheapest listing collapsed to €0.02 once demand faded. Thin markets amplify both directions, which is why the ST score should be a shortlist, not a shopping list.

The experiment: what if you bought all 50, every day?

Now the fun part. Suppose someone mechanically bought one copy of every card on the Hot Deals list, every single day, from 7 June to 7 July — no judgement, no skipping, always paying the cheapest listed price that day. That's 1,550 purchases. What would the position be worth at day 31?

• Total spent: €31,206
• Value at 8 July (marked at today's cheapest listing): €33,080
• P&L: +€1,874, or +6.0% — in a month, holding every pick blindly
• 24 of the 31 daily cohorts are in profit; the best day's basket (28 June) is up 57%, the worst (12 June) is down 14.5%
• Per purchase: 570 wins, 434 losses, 546 flat

One day deserves an asterisk: on 20 June, the list included a Manga-rare Chopper (OP08-001) whose cheapest copy was listed at €8,000 — a quarter of the whole month's budget in a single card (it's still €8,000 today, so it neither helped nor hurt). If we exclude every purchase above €500 to keep the experiment realistic for a normal collector, the numbers get better: €18,181 spent, worth €20,150 today — +10.8% in 30 days.

For context: those returns are unrealistically pessimistic in one way (we "sell" at the cheapest listed price, the lowest possible mark) and unrealistically optimistic in another (no CardMarket fees, no shipping, and it assumes the cheapest copy was actually buyable). Real-world results would land somewhere in between — and a human who skips the obviously illiquid penny cards would likely have done better than the blind version.

So how do you actually spot the good ones?

Three patterns separated the winners from the noise this month:

• Persistence beats novelty. The big gainers kept re-appearing on the list as they climbed — Teach 21 times, Brook (OP15-032) 22 times, Chopper (ST29-007) 18 times. A card that shows up once and vanishes usually had a one-off blip; a card that stays on the list for a week is being restocked by the algorithm because the squeeze is still on.
• Check the sales, not just the listing count. A thin offer book with zero actual sales is a trap, not a squeeze. Open the card page and look at detected sales and the days-to-target estimate — the ST score now treats zero-sales cards much more harshly for exactly this reason.
• Mind the price bracket. Sub-€1 cards dominate both the biggest percentage wins and the total wipeouts. If you want percentage fireworks, accept the variance; if you want steadier results, the €5–50 bracket produced most of the reliable gainers this month.

The full methodology behind the ST score — offer-book walking, confidence-weighted sales velocity, the works — is documented in How OPMT Scores Work and in the guide. Or just open today's list and see what the algorithm is flagging right now.

Methodology: daily top-50 reconstructed from OPMT's ST score history, 7 June – 7 July 2026. Entry prices are the cheapest listed NM English copy on the purchase day; current values are the cheapest listed copy on 8 July 2026. Prices are CardMarket listings in EUR. Excludes fees and shipping. This is a historical analysis, not financial advice — past performance does not guarantee future results.