When you attend a Magic convention, it’s normal to expect to see singles vendors. Why not at Commander Sealed?
Commander Sealed has long avoided accepting or inviting these vendors, replacing their focus instead with a charity auction. It’s not malice, we love our colleagues in the singles market. And the reason for this is simple; when we attend a show with spare money, it’s common as Magic fans to spend it on singles! And why not? At this specific event, we want to encourage folks to spend in places that maximize the benefit to charities instead.
Singles vendors also tend to buy a lot more than they sell, and that makes it hard for them to participate is vigorous donors to the charities the event is intended to support. Their costs are high, often more than their sales at a big limited event. Some might offer to, but we encourage them to donate directly, and we’re happy to include their name in our sponsors list!
We also want to provide a different atmosphere – no pawn shop-style haggling, no hurt feeling about convention pricing of collectables, no one upset to be selling the 40th copy to the same vendor and getting a worse price. That whole vibe just isn’t quite right, so we opted out of it – we want 100% feel good, support of artists and charitable giving, and that means changing a few things up. Speaking of charities…
At Commander Sealed, we want the goal to be to fundraise for our charities – 100% of our auction sales go to our annual charities. So every spare dollar attendees have tends to go into bidding on these items, and that’s our goal. To that end, we also try to encourage folks to donate on site, and what better way to do that than with the singles you just opened?
To that end, we also have a donation box for singles opened during the main event and side events – which are mostly limited by design. That box of bulk can be bid on throughout the weekend in our auction, and the winner takes home whatever participants put in it, plus some guaranteed items supplies by our host Just Games Rochester.
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