Magic players love to complain.

During the match, after the match, sometimes even before the match. They complain about luck, judge calls, and unfair cards. What most players don't realize is that complaining is one of the worst thing you can do for your mental game. It puts your focus on how the world could have been, not how it is. Mentally, it takes the result of the game out of your hands, and gives it to something outside of your control (ever notice how nobody complains about being outplayed or making a huge error?). The worse the situation, the more important every last thing you do in the game is - and the more focus you are going to have to give to finding the path to victory. The more you complain, the less clear your thoughts are, and the less mental energy you can put towards your goal of winning.

Let me illustrate this with some roleplaying: You are playing UW tapout against Jund and things are looking good, despite your mulligan to six. You are at eight life and in your hand you have a Path and a flashfreeze. You have a Wall of Omens, a Jace with two counters and a freshly cast Baneslayer in play along with five mana. Your opponent is still at twelve, but his board is down to just two saproling tokens, and their hand contains only a single Putrid Leech that you bounced last turn. One attack with the Baneslayer and a brainstorm next turn should lock it up.

Then it happens - Bloodbraid Elf into Malestrom Pulse killing the Angel, and the attack takes out your Jace. Hero to zero in point five seconds.

There is a lot to complain about here. Your opponent could have drawn a blank. He could have only cast terminate or pulse, leaving you with a Jace. Instead he won the Cascade Lottery and decimated your board. How lucky.

After you complain about what your opponent did, the doubt sets in. You could have held the Baneslayer until you had the mana to back it up with a counter. You could Brainstormed instead and maybe hit a second wall, or even an Elspeth. There are at least five different plays that would have left you in a better position than you are right now. You start complaining to yourself, "Why didn't I wait a turn, why didn't I play around that topdeck."

When you draw for your turn and get a Martial Coup, you complain that you are still two mana short, and when your opponent attacks, you Path their Bloodbraid, go to seven, then counter their Putrid Leech. You think "Okay, we're back to even…how are they going to luck me out next?" Then they play a Raging Ravine. What a topdeck. You ask yourself "How is this guy running so hot?"

This is how people lose games they should win. Not by their opponent's lucky break, but by their inability to move beyond it. They second guess their decisions that don't turn out well. They complain (often loudly) during the game about their opponent's luck and spend the rest of the game hunched over looking for their turn to get lucky, as if it's their right. They don't want to look at the hard decisions ahead of them, and instead retreat to a time when everything was simple and under control. They just want things to be over with.

Now, I'm not going to say that Baneslayer was the correct play - though it almost certainly was. The same with bouncing the Leech. I can't guarantee that it was correct, but none of that matters anymore. Now is not the time to figure out the optimal play in that situation. Whatever happened, happened. You chose a series of plays to maneuver yourself into a winning position, and your opponent trumped it. Now you need to start on a new path.

Let's now imagine that it wasn't you playing before the Cascade turn. Imagine instead you walked by the match, saw the Jund player's hand (a single Putrid Leech) then and saw the UW player draw the Martial Coup. That player then tags you in, and you get to play the rest of the match.

You no longer have the baggage of thinking about just how good your board position was a turn ago. Hitting the perfect cascade last turn isn't relevant. Now that you have a fresh perspective, how bad is this situation, really? Your hand still has two cards that are very good in the matchup. You are at a reasonably high life total, and your deck is full of live cards. A Gideon will buy you several turns to Coup, as will Elspeth. A Chalice will give you the mana the next turn to clear the board, and even a Knight of the White Orchid will do a decent job of holding down the fort. As long as you play around the cards that are going to be a problem - Blightning, Ravine, Broodmate - this game is going to be hard to lose.

So, how did you get here? Chances are you were already a bit on tilt after mulliganing against Jund. A lot of players have a hard time mentally recovering from being down one card at the start (and many will all but give up when starting down by two). You started out ready to lose. You just needed an excuse. Instead of figuring out how to best use your resources, you wasted a Path to save a single point of damage, and countered a creature that you could deal with using Path or Coup (even if it would have taken a few turns), and finally left yourself open to another topdeck. You gave your opponent the opportunity to make almost any reasonable draw a potential game winner. The second that Malestrom Pulse flipped up, you were rehearsing your bad beat story.

You might say that in the above situation, you would have acted differently but there are plenty of games where everyone has fallen into the same trap. I've done it countless times myself.

Winning at Magic means accepting where you are in the game, living with your decisions, and always moving forward. It may not be your fault that you lost two of your best cards, but it is your problem. Don't complain, deal with it. Don't yell at your opponent, take your anger or frustration and use it to fuel your comeback. It may or may not be your fault that you are 2-1, but you can't let the early loss take you out of the tournament. Take every match from that point out as what it is - a single match - and win the next five so that you can play in the top8.

Complaining puts you in the mindset that it's okay to lose. Don't give yourself the excuse. Figure out a way to win the game, no matter how unlikely or how implausable, and focus on that. Be confident. Put up a fight and let your opponent know you don't plan on going down that easily. Don't let a little bit of bad luck beat you. Do you realize that you can spot your opponent a whole game EVERY match and still win?

I've won dozens of seemingly unwinnable games only because my opponent didn't know what to do when I wouldn't give up. Why the mulligan to five didn't seem to phase me. Why the seemingly lethal horde of creatures across the table didn't make me sweat. They wracked their brain looking for the onboard trick. They tried to figure out what they were missing, what they needed to play around. Eventually their fear and lack of confidence tricked them into playing around nothing and giving me an extra turn. So, when I did top deck my only answer, they cursed my luck. The luck they let me have.

So, save the complaints for the trip home. There will be plenty of time to reflect on what you could have done better, and how to improve your showing next time. Sometimes you really did get mana flooded, and sometimes it all stemmed back to a poor keep. It is very hard to be objective when the sting of it all is still in your mind. During the tournament you have more important things to work about - mainly the next turn, game, or match. Close the complaint desk, and send it all to voice mail. I think you'll find that your mood and your tournament results will improve greatly as a result.