Rashod Bateman

Centering is measured, not eyeballed: the printed frame and the outer card edge are located at sub-pixel resolution, and the border ratios come directly from those measurements.

Ratios:

Left/right and top/bottom border splits. Official buffers: a front within 60/40 and a back within 75/25 measure as perfect; the front counts for 80% of the centering subgrade, the back 20%.

Overlay:

Cyan rectangle = the card's outer edge; orange = the printed frame. Parallel, evenly spaced rectangles are what a well-centered card looks like.

Every corner is graded three ways at once — an AI examiner reads the photo, a trained classifier and reference library compare it against thousands of graded corners, and where the boundary is clean enough, the corner is physically measured from its silhouette. Everything below speaks one language:

Corner annotation:

Each corner's word is its annotation class, assigned directly from the decimal: Pristine 9.9+ · Sharp 9.75–9.8 · Very slight touch 9.4–9.7 · Slight rounding 9.05–9.3 · Minor rounding 8.2–9.0 · Moderate flattening 7.0–8.1 · Heavy rounding below 7. Same vocabulary used to annotate and train the corner models. Whitening and fray are separate observations from the color photo. The weakest corner anchors the corners subgrade.

Tip angle:

The angle where the two cut edges meet, found by fitting a straight line along each edge. A factory-square corner measures 87–93°. It is a squareness test, not a ranking — everyday wear happens at the very tip and leaves the edges untouched, so a worn corner can still measure ~90°. Only a skewed or crushed corner fails this test.

Deficit:

The percentage of material missing from the tip wedge — the gap between where a perfect tip would be and where this card's material actually ends. Under 2% means the tip is fully present.

Roughness:

How much the cut edge waves compared to a perfectly straight line, in pixels. A clean factory cut measures under about 2px.

Whitening & fray:

Surface wear read from the color photo — geometry cannot see it. Severities are the grading rubric's own words: trace, minor, obvious, heavy for whitening; light, evident, exposed for fray. This is how a geometrically square corner can still lose points: to whitening, not shape.

Visual proof:

Red and blue lines are the fitted cut edges; the yellow ring marks where a perfect tip would be; the green ring marks where material actually ends. Rings stacked on top of each other mean a square corner.

When numbers are absent:

If printed design runs along the boundary, the instrument cannot measure reliably. Those corners show the photo only, and the grade rests on the full model consensus. Factory-rounded cards (Pokémon and other TCGs) are die-cut with a corner radius, so square-tip measurements do not apply — those corners are graded by the model consensus and the rounded-corner reference library.

Read the full methodology: How to Grade Card Corners — the CardFax white paper →

Each of the four edges is graded on the official scale from full-resolution strips of the actual scan, front and back.

Edge grade:

Reflects the worse of the front and back condition for that edge; the weakest edge anchors the edges subgrade under the official formula.

Condition notes:

Plain-language findings for both faces — chipping, roughness, and specks show most clearly on dark card stock.

Strips:

Native-resolution slices of the scan itself, not re-renders — what you see is the actual edge.

The surface is examined in multiple independent passes over both the color scan and an etched relief view that exaggerates texture, so gloss cannot hide pressure marks.

Markers:

Each marker pins a finding to its location on the card. Flat, round dots under the gloss are print artifacts from the factory, not damage.

Etched view:

A relief rendering of the same scan — creases, dents, and scratches cast visible ridges in it.

Surface subgrade:

The whole-number floor of the surface grade caps the card's overall grade under the official formula.