Wanted to go with wisdom/preference of the crowd here as centering is one of the few areas of the overall assessment of card quality that can (for 95%+ cases) be rigidly defined. One of the gray areas that doesn’t have much consensus is are cards ‘off center’ by design - speaking here specifically of some Ex Era cards (feel free to provide more/other examples as the more documented the better - it helps us).
Our dev team at Mantis Grading has spent a lot of time making modules as scalable and uniform as possible and have had a lot of discussion on the handling of these instances.
Identify edges as pictured, which is definitely the most incorrect from a T/B perspective.
Ignore T/B centering entirely (and potentially L/R in certain other instances) - I’m almost certain this ‘rule’ is used by other, more established, grading companies.
Compare the ratio of the top right corner borders (Top vs Right) and consider that to be the overall centering quality of the front.
indicate the bottom edge horizon at the beginning of the ‘pipe’.
Expedition Dragonite renders option 4 a little less desirable.
The community appears to be split on option 2 and option 3. Overall, centering is one of the least impactful components of overall grade (barring egregious examples). But because we give metrics on our card detail page - it’s prudent to poll the most knowledgeable section of the community.
I’ve never seen that Ampharos before and I just want to say I love how it looks like the holo is illuminated by its tail bulb. Like bokeh or dust particles or something. Beautiful card.
Ampharos (and all other of this exact design) measuring as you indicated makes a lot of sense. We’ll just need to present that ratio and also incorporate that statistic into the overall grading algorithm.
Question on your proposed Dragonite example. When you reference L/B - where exactly are you defining the line for comparison (bottom of ‘pipe’, the ‘textbox’ region, something different?).
As an aside - would love to document other examples of either borderless or ‘misaligned’ (by design) cards. Really appreciate it.
I’m a fan of it too. That image posted is actually one someone submitted to us for grading. This particular card has a very very feint ‘crimp’ along the left border. If I were to guess how that happened I’m pretty certain it is a result of binder storage.
Here’s a snippet under a different imaging modality.
Arguably this ratio doesn’t even matter that much as the other two sides. If the other two are 1:1, I imagine this should also be 1:1.
The problem will be if the cut is shifted both right and up to the same degree. The two ratios here would still be 1:1 and from a visual perspective it will still look good. But the card is not aligned with the intended factory parameters. You’d have to calculate what the “correct” ratio between the two smaller sides and two bigger sides should be. It shouldn’t be too hard to calculate if you take a bunch of scans and average out the numbers
Yeah I actually lean that the T/R ratio is thorough and robust enough to be the rule. Over time as we collect more and more examples of all the cards we’ll be able to collate some ‘summary statistics’ if you will and could stumble into some useful information on other areas.
We want to avoid at nearly all costs a ‘moving’ standard. I don’t believe the discovery of that hypothetical factory standard would move the needle in any example where the T/R litmus test determined a proper assessment.
Another ‘fun’ development of storing the (eventual) large db of submissions scans is our computer vision modules inventories all sorts of information including x,y location of text, images, etc. There’s a chance to unearth some variants that perhaps didn’t receive a discerning eye because it’s a benign bit of information to the average collector (and especially to the large companies that have humans grading).
That adoption of course is the hurdle. Have had some submitters but hopefully a compounding affect. Leaning into the community and thoughtful responses on intricacies like this hopefully builds some goodwill. I certainly appreciate it!
