[easybox]Sam Stoddard will now be found writing regularly for ManaNation on Mondays, helping kick off the week with awesome Magic content![/easybox]

Mistakes are not why you lose games. A mistake may cost you the game, but it is only the symptom of a larger problem that is losing you games. With any luck, you won't make a single mistake more than once or twice. People tend to learn from their mistakes pretty quickly. It's hard to forget that Wilt-Leaf Liege enters the battlefield if your opponent makes you discard it after you've just chosen it with a turn 1 Thoughtseize. That lesson is sticking with you.

If becoming a better player was as simple as making every mistake possible until there were none left, then everybody would be terrible. Magic is an incredibly diverse game, and even playing the same matchup for hours on end will rarely produce two games that are identical. Getting better at Magic is more than just alleviating the symptoms when they pop up. You need to look beneath the surface and figure out why you made the mistake. It is a hard process, because it generally requires you to admit that you are not nearly as good as you think you are.

In my last article I mentioned that there are different kind of mistakes. I want to go into that a little bit more. Misclicks, Blunders and Punts. These categories are broad and a little overly simplistic, but they do a good job of starting the conversation on what the root causes of the mistakes you make in a game are.

Misclick – This is where you mistap, pass priority wrong, or otherwise do anything that hitting the wrong key in MODO would make you do. Misclicks generally happen when you are playing too quickly or just don't understand timing issues in an interaction.

Blunders – Blunders are usually errors out of laziness or carelessness. Ever attack your 2/2 into your opponent's 2/3 without realizing it? Ever Mana Leaked a Great Sable Stag? Those are blunders.

Punts – The above two errors are accidental. This error is intentional. You make a decision (For instance, killing the Knight of the Reliquary in the previous article) that ends up being just plain wrong.

If you are misclicking a lot, then the chances are you are playing the game too quickly or using your time poorly. If you are playing a deck that has high colored mana requirements (IE Jund) then you should be working out in your head what mana to leave open at all times. You can build shortcuts into your thinking process (IE, always tap Spreading Seas'd land first for colorless, even if it 'doesn't matter') to help reduce misclicks without slowing your game down to a glacial pace. These are by far the easiest to correct.

Blunders too are situations where you aren't focusing on the game enough, and you can't be bothered to get all of the information you need to make a decision. You are focused either too heavily in the past or future and so when it is time for you to react to a spell or an attack, you often use information that isn't there. These are harder to correct, because the error is quite often due to your opponents cards, but taking a greater interest in what your opponent is doing and what their board state is like will help to make these happen less often.

Punts, on the whole, are much harder to fix. These can happen because you spent too little time thinking out your play, or because you spent too much time and overthought the whole thing. Chances are, the source for the punt happened a long time before the game with some kind of hang up or bias. Sometimes you try and recreate a board position that won you a game earlier, without any regard to how good that board position is in the current game. Sometimes you overvalue or undervalue a card. Generally these come down to a problem you have with the fundamentals of your game.

When you make a mistake, keep playing the game. Don't let it bog you down. If you need to make a note about it, do so, but don't use it as an excuse to lose. Once the match or tournament is over, look at the major mistakes that you make, and try to do an autopsy on them. By simplying categorizing any mistake you make into one of these areas, you can start looking at them as a narrative of what is wrong with your game. The fewer and fewer big mistakes you make, the further down you need to dig. Didn't send any creatures to their on-board doom this game? Where there points that you could have gotten a few more points of damage in? Where there points where you got blown out by a trick that you could have played around better? Could you have won that nail-biter in a somewhat more decisive manner instead of getting into a top-deck war?

No matter what you do, you will make mistakes.

The final thing every player needs to do is to come to grips with something: No matter what you do, you will make mistakes. Mistakes, big and small, are a huge part of Magic and something that is not going to magically go away in the future. In fact, it can be a very dangerous negative-feedback loop for players who are right on the cusp of success. They practice, and play with better players, and all of a sudden, they find that you're making a lot more mistakes. You go from a time period where you think you are playing really well, to all of a sudden making 2-3 mistakes a game, maybe more like five or six. Most player's immediate thought is that all of this practice isn't working, and they should go back to what they are doing before.

That would be the wrong thing to do. Most players who are stuck at their current level of skill think that they are playing very good Magic. They have managed to get very comfortable with what they are doing, and are not actively trying to figure out what they could have done better. More importantly, they aren't looking at what they have done wrong unless it has a huge impact on the game. Left RG open instead of RB with a Terminate in hand? Well, unless that keeps you from killing a Sovereigns of Lost Alara before it can put a Mythic Conscription on a creature, you might not remember it. The more you begin to take every single action you make in the game seriously, and own up to the dozens of mistakes you make a game, there is no way you can start working on them.

If you can start dissecting all of the mistakes you make in a game, you will begin to find out what is causing them. Go through a mental process like the first part of this article. Figure out what caused you to make the bad play that you did, and write it down. Keep track of these. Even if it doesn't seem like any individual root problem makes sense, a large enough collection of them will start to form a picture. If you can embrace the idea that you are an imperfect player, and that there are hundreds of ways you could improve your game, you can start on fixing them one at a time.

I wish there was a quick way to play a better game of Magic, but there isn't. It requires a lot of work and self-awareness. I want to say that one more time, because it is so important. Self-awareness is one of the most important characteristics of a good player. You need be honest with yourself and not try to convince yourself that there was nothing you could do. There is always something you could have done. Even if what you could have done was a bad play, or brought a different deck, every aspect of the game is under your control to some respect. It is better to live in a world where you have the ultimate control of your destiny than to live in one where you are subject to the whims of the fates. Just because a play or a course of action would have won you the game, doesn't make it correct. All you can do is keep working towards the perfect game, even if you won't ever reach it. The more you try, the more you will improve, and the more success you will find. View every mistake as a learning experience, and take as much from it as you possibly can. Losing a game, a match, or even a tournament will be worth it if it makes you a better player in the long run.