Release Log
The engine ships like software. Because it is software.
CardFax improves in versioned releases, on the record. Every entry below made grading measurably better — and none of them changed a grade already issued. The loop sharpens the future, never rewrites the past.
Releases that change how a card is measured are named for the bench instrument they turn into software — Level, Loupe, Straightedge — and each ships with its paper.
September 2026
Edge Metrology: Every Cut Line, Traced
The engine now holds a straightedge to every edge: the cut line is traced at full resolution and compared against the line the factory intended, reporting how much of the edge is rough (coverage), how far it departs (amplitude), and what kind of rough it is — chips bitten inward versus fibers left standing by the blade. Running in shadow mode on every card graded; the published edge bands and the edge law are unchanged. On its first reading it independently found the one rough edge the examiner had charged — on both faces — and nothing anywhere else.
Read the paper: CF-WP-2026-004 — Edge Metrology →Surface: The Manufacturing-Artifact Doctrine
Press-era print dots are a signature of how a card was made, not how it was kept — so isolated minor dots now deduct linearly with a combined cap instead of snowballing under the stacking multiplier. A dot-speckled but otherwise clean junk-wax surface lands in the mid-8s, not the 5s; genuine damage still stacks. Like a loupe in a grader's hand, the release is about telling what a mark is before deciding what it costs.
Read the paper: CF-WP-2026-003 — Surface Defect Deductions →MOSES 2.15: Corner Lift Detection
A grader's hands caught a slight corner curl the scan had read as sharp. The engine now measures the shadow a lifted corner casts on the scan bed — normalized against the card's own eight corners and confirmed against the front/back mirror pair — on every card graded, and mirror-confirmed curls deduct at grade time. Shipped in shadow mode and activated the same day after the flag went two-for-two against physical review. A level detects the one thing the eye reads wrong: out-of-plane.
Read the paper: CF-FR-2026-001 — The Corner That Graded Sharp →Batch Speed Grading
A graded seed card now teaches its copies: centering runs hands-free across duplicates of the same card, and miscuts are automatically parked for individual review instead of slowing the batch.
Nightly Population Identity Audit
Every population count is now backed by a nightly registry-wide identity audit — player, set, number, and variation are verified before a card is counted, so one card can never inflate two population lines.
Blind Corner Calibration Program
Examiners review corners in the 9.0-10.0 band without seeing the machine's answer. Every agreement confirms the model; every disagreement becomes training signal for the next MOSES release.
August 2026
Measured Evidence on the Public CardFax
The geometry behind each corner grade — the silhouette measurements themselves — is now published on the public CardFax record, so anyone can see why a card earned its grade.
MOSES: Silhouette Geometry Layer
A new fourth analysis layer measures the outline of every corner directly, giving MOSES a pure-geometry check on every grade the ensemble produces.
Surface Back Parity
Card backs now receive the full surface treatment — dedicated speck detection and magnified quadrant review — matching the scrutiny fronts have always had.
Speed Grading
The grading pipeline was rebuilt end to end, cutting average grading time from 223 seconds to 58 seconds with zero change to grading standards.
Set-Aware Centering Priors
Centering is now guided by priors for the specific set being graded — the engine knows how wide a set's borders run before it measures your copy.
July 2026
Automatic Card Detection at Intake
The scanner now detects, crops, and fits the card automatically at capture, anchoring every downstream measurement to the card itself rather than the photo.
Full-Pipeline Performance Overhaul
Bounded image decoding and modern formats across the pipeline — large scans no longer trade speed for measurement quality.
June 2026
MOSES Four-Layer Ensemble in Production
The complete corner ensemble — detection, library similarity, AI examiner, and rules — verified end to end in production, with the training pipeline refreshing the sample library every 30 minutes.
Every release starts in the loop
Releases are not roadmap promises — they come out of the closed loop of grading, recording, and calibration that runs every day.
How the Engine Works