Note: This article is a rare distraction from the usual finance-focused content on Quiet Speculation. We'll return to making money with little pieces of cardboard shortly!

Magic, like so many competitive endeavors, is a game of inches. Every mistake you make in a given game has amazing potential to impact your entire Magic career. Imagine this hypothetical situation in which any talented player could find himself: You're a 1900+ rated Constructed player, playing in a PTQ for the Top 8. You're playing 5 Color Control, and you just played the wrong Vivid Land on turn 1. Because of this, you need to remove an extra counter to cast a Broken Ambitions next turn, and 15 untap, upkeep, and draws later, you suddenly can't buy a red source to play a game-winning Volcanic Fallout. All because you played the wrong land that turn. As a result, you take an extra turn of combat damage, which means you don't get one more turn to find that Cruel Ultimatum on top of your deck, which means you lose the game, the match and your spot in top 8. Killer, for sure, but then you check the ratings when they're posted the following Wednesday. It seems that your rating at 6-1 in the tournament was good enough to snag you a 3rd bye at the upcoming Grand Prix, but losing the 8th round knocked you below the threshold again and that was your last shot at ratings-based bye. In Round 3, you play Lucky Little Timmy McDragonface who is miraculously 2-0 with his Quillspike Combo deck (of course lacking the really good cards like Glen Elendra Archmage). You lose horribly because you never tested the Timmy Quillspike matchup, and go on to miss day 2 by a single match. Then your dog gets hit by a car. All because you played the wrong land that turn.

With the exception of the unfortunate traffic accident involving your pooch, all of this sturm und drang could have been prevented. That's clearly a very exaggerated example but if you look at your play history, I'm sure you can find ample situations where this butterfly effect has a much bigger reach than you initially realized. I lost a vital game at Regionals by not bottom-decking a card when I clashed. I'd have drawn an Esper Charm the turn before I died, instead of a land. The charm would have let me play Cruel Ultimatum, which would have bought me a turn and drawn me into all the right cards to win the game and the match. I was literally one draw away from winning that game, and my 2nd turn clash decision lost it for me.

Again, Magic is a game of inches. What does that even mean? It means that even though 99.9% of the things you do are correct, the 0.1% of your choices that are just blatantly wrong are enough to quite reliably ruin your day. No matter who you are, you WILL make a mistake at some point. Realizing the mistake in a timely manner is all that's important. The best time to realize one is when you're about to make one. If you know your deck uses EVERY vivid counter eventually, and you rely on those vivid lands to make the Red mana for Fallout, maybe you should let that turn 2 spell resolve after all. Or maybe you should adjust your mana base, you greedy pig. But alas, mistakes happen. We all make them. Oddly enough, we mostly make the same mistakes. All but the most disciplined players are bothered by the mistakes FAR more than they should be. The rest of us begin spouting off a ridiculous inner monologue that's so destructive to our play skill and our ego that it should be punishable by a savage beating.

If this sounds like you, don't be surprised. I wonder if I should even be playing this game. So many people are probably better than me. [Pro Player] would never make that mistake. Maybe I'm just not cut out for high level play. I'll never "Q" if I keep making dumb mistakes. I guess I just don't "have what it takes". I should give up. To hell with drafting, I'm opening these packs - I need some new card smell to make me feel better.

It's all a bunch of egoic, self indulgant, garbage. Magic's a tough game. The interactions between the cards and the imperfect information and the different play styles make it approximately impossible to be right 100% of the time. There's no "secret" or "magic pill" to getting better. Well actually, there is: it's a little drug I like to call Practice, and it should be taken twice daily with food. I'm sure you've done tons of difficult stuff in your lifetime. Things you take for granted now, like speaking your native language, learning to walk, learning to drive a car - these are all things that were obscenely hard when you first started. Heck, they had to hire a speech therapist to ensure that I didn't sound like there were rocks in my mouth. The point is, the only way you learned to do that stuff was by doing it. Practice. In Magic, practice will never make perfect, but it'll give you those vital 0.1 percentage points you need to separate yourself from the pack. There's no alchemy, no special sauce, and nothing sexy about it, but that's what separates the field in this game. There's a certain confidence that can only be attained by truly having "been there" and having "done that". So get there, do that, and I promise you'l be a better player for it. Even the best players to ever have played the game make the same dumb mistakes you do. You just make them more often and don't recover as well.

To the perfectionists out there, those intolerable handful for whom 99.99 does not equal 100, I leave you with this thought. In baseball, the difference between a multi-millionaire All-Star hitter and a player who's barely justifying a major-league salary is about 38 hits in a season. Over 162 games, the difference between a stellar .333 average and a mediocre .270 average translates to an extra hit every 4 or 5 games. Did you know that it takes a 95 MPH fastball well under half a second to reach the strike zone, and 2/3rds of that time is occupied by your brain processing the ball and sending signals to the muscles to swing (or not)? Now consider that an 8th of an inch on the bat in almost any direction is all that separates a home run, a foul tip, a grounder to first, a long fly ball, and a pop-up, not to mention where in the strike zone the bat hits the ball. Still want to complain that Magic is hard?

You're going to make a mistake in the next game of Magic you play. I guarantee it. It might be a small one, so small that you don't even notice. You might make a major misplay and still blow your enemy out of the water. But you're going to make one, so keep your eyes open and as soon as you see yourself making a mistake, remember the PTQ horror story. Your story can end two ways - "...all because I played the wrong land that turn!" or "...so now I need to figure out what to play on my first Pro Tour."