# Touchstone 0.2 Touchstone is an open, reproducible standard for turning a card condition assessment into a grade. The assessment is measured centering plus an enumerated list of defects. Given the same assessment and rubric version, conforming implementations reproduce the calculation. Identifying and classifying damage requires judgment; reproducible arithmetic does not prove the assessment correct. This file is the markdown counterpart of the site's root page. That page is interactive. It scores an illustrative assessment in front of the visitor, who commits a judgement before the ledger is revealed, so what follows describes it rather than transcribing something that only exists once you press a control. ## What the root page does It shows a schematic and stipulated findings: two faces, three defects and centering ratios. These are example inputs, not a measured capture or evidence of inspection accuracy. The diagram is illustrative rather than metrology. The visitor picks a grade from the standard's own scale, rendered verbatim: 1 to 9 in half steps, then a counted and captioned gap where 9.5 would be, then 10. There's no 9.5 because the ladder promotes it to 10. Adding one wouldn't insert a grade. It would remove 10s. Committing reveals the ledger: every deduction named, priced and linked to the rule that priced it, with each region's sub-score and both of the minimums that produce the final number. The worst region caps the face, and the worse face caps the card. Then the ladder calculation, then the grade. The specimen scores 772 points, grade 7.5, bound by a flattened top-left corner on the front. Corner and edge penalties on the front carry a ×1.3 multiplier; the same moderate corner finding on the back alone scores 825 points / grade 8. Every score and deduction in the interactive example is computed in the browser by the published scorer reading the published rubric. None of it is written into the page. ## Where to go next - The normative specification: - What's open, and what isn't: - Governance, and the steward's conflict of interest: - Licence and the commitments that bind: - The schemas: - Dated clarifications to the released prose: ## Market context The homepage's market context is dated September 6, 2026, not a live tracker. GemRate reported [3.61 million cards in July](https://www.gemrate.com/july-2026-recap) and [3.40 million in August](https://www.gemrate.com/august-2026-recap). The [dated backlog tracker](https://www.psacard.com/info/backlog-tracker) reports a reduction from 12.4 million units on July 28 to approximately 10.9 million on August 25. An open calculation does not eliminate inspection work or its costs. ## Running it yourself ``` npm i github:touchstone-standard/touchstone#v0.2 ``` ```js import { score } from "@touchstonestandard/rubric"; import rubric from "@touchstonestandard/rubric/rubric.json" with { type: "json" }; const r = score( { back: { defects: [{ region: "corner", corner: "br", severity: "moderate" }] } }, rubric, ); console.log(r.points, r.grade); // 825 8 ``` That result is asserted in three independent places: the README, the worked example in the rubric, and the conformance vectors. A machine that disagrees has found a bug in one of them.