Look between the picture and the cut
Centering describes the placement of the printed design inside the card's borders. It isn't a judgment about whether the character stands in the middle of the composition. An artist can put a face off to one side on purpose while the printed card remains correctly centered.
That distinction matters in Sable City, where a surveillance still and a poster portrait can frame the same person very differently. Judge the print's relationship to the card, not whether the person's nose lines up with the center of your screen.
Physical graders publish their own tolerances. PSA's standards, for example, discuss front and reverse centering separately. Those tolerances are not a conversion table for Lockbox. Smash & Grab uses a 1–10 centering subgrade and its own digital wear model.
Try a border comparison
Imagine a simple framed image with a 3-unit border on the left and a 2-unit border on the right. Of the five units of combined horizontal border, 60% sits on one side and 40% on the other. That's a useful picture of what people mean by a 60/40 split.
It does not tell you the Lockbox grade. Nor does that one measurement describe the top and bottom or any rotation. Use it to learn what imbalance looks like, then read the actual subgrade attached to your digital copy.
| What you notice | What to check |
|---|---|
| The character is placed to one side | Is that part of the artwork's composition? |
| One printed border looks wider | Compare opposite borders with the slab viewed straight on. |
| The whole card looks narrower on one side | Is the 3D slab tilted away from you? |
The camera can fool a quick glance
A tilted slab creates perspective. The side nearer the viewer can look larger than the far side. Reflections and the plastic frame can also make one border harder to see. Before judging a shift, bring the inspected card toward a straight-on view.
Then compare the same art variant if you have another copy. Comparing a surveillance image with a different portrait introduces a composition change at the same time. The useful question is whether the print moved relative to the cut, not whether two artworks arrange their subjects identically.
How centering affects the grade
Centering contributes 20% of Lockbox's weighted average. That is the smallest of the four weights, but it can still determine the result because the lowest-subgrade cap applies to every category.
Take an illustrative card with Centering 6 and the other three subgrades at 8. Its weighted average is 7.6. That rounds down to 7.5, but the lowest subgrade caps the overall grade at 6.5. The final label is therefore 6.5 Excellent.
So “centering only counts for twenty percent” is an incomplete reading. The weight describes one step of the calculation. The cap prevents the other categories from concealing the weakest one.
How the digital version expresses it
The wear model gives the printed image room to drift and rotate inside the card. It uses the copy's condition and stable placement choices rather than moving the print randomly every time you inspect it. The effect is a visual interpretation of the recorded subgrade.
That makes centering an inspectable part of the object instead of a statistic detached from the artwork. It still doesn't make a shifted print a weaker character. Haul, Heat and role remain unchanged.
When you next compare copies, take a moment before looking at the big grade. Square up the view, follow the borders, then read Centering. You'll start to recognize a detail that a tiny Stash thumbnail can easily hide.