#84. LIBOR & Taxes (Thursday, February 20, 2020)

#84. LIBOR & Taxes (Thursday, February 20, 2020)

What was your best day…of discovering something new that no one else had discovered before?

Warning: This entry contains a lot of Magic: The Gathering references; it may help to read entries #113 and #95 first.

Let me start by explaining the wonderful triple-entendre that is “LIBOR & Taxes”:

  1. “LIBOR & Taxes” is the name of a semi-competitive, somewhat-infamous red-white Magic the Gathering deck, first developed by ice_nine, for the Modern Constructed format. LIBOR stands for “Lands in the battlefield are overrated”. In Magic, lands are the resource cards the players use to play the spells and creatures they need to win. This deck wins by combining two effects: (1) destroying the opponent’s lands; and (2) “taxing” them by making their spells and abilities cost more.
  2. LIBOR also refers to the “London Inter-bank Offer Rate”, which for over fifty years has been one of the most relied-upon numbers in finance1. Regulators have tried for years to discontinue it2; but the industry has resisted—so, like death and taxes, it’s never going away3.
  3. For all of 2019, I (ice_nine) devoted almost all of my non-Magic time researching LIBOR and the policy implications of its imminent termination. The name thus started as a joke between him and his colleagues: when he started bailing on them Wednesday nights to play Modern Magic and test this deck, he was just gonna to be doing more “LIBOR & Taxes”…

So how did this monstrosity come about?

It all started one night in August 2019. I had been playing Limited format Magic (#113) off and on for the past eight years. But hadn’t touched any Constructed formats (like Modern)—i.e. the ones where you build your own decks—because I didn’t want to play a 60-card list optimized by a hive mind of hundreds of thousands of players. If I was going to play Modern, I was going to have to build my own totally new deck strategy—and (somehow) win.

Given the size of that hive mind, the “winning” part was, at best, a pipe dream. But, somehow, that night I got it in my head that a dedicated “getting rid of opponents’ lands” strategy was underrated, and I could find a way to make it work…

What followed was six months of: putting a deck together, losing with it a lot in the Free Magic Online Open Play Rooms, swapping some cards to make it better, winning with it in the Open Play Rooms, losing with it a lot in the more competitive Magic Online Modern Leagues, iterating it further, still losing a lot in the Leagues, discovering the power of my soon-to-be favorite card Suppression Field and adding the whole “taxes” component to the deck, losing a bit less in the Leagues, iterating even further, losing a bit less and getting cursed at more and more by salty online opponents accusing me of playing an “unfun” deck, iterating further…until this fateful night.

Side Note: Suppression Field made the opponent’s “fetch-lands” more costly to activate. Fetch-lands were extremely powerful (and hence overpriced) cards that allow you to search your deck for more lands…but if you didn’t have the lands to activate them in the first place, well then you couldn’t search. A lot of my games would end with the opponent in an awkward Catch-22 where they have 5-8 unusable fetch-lands (worth $300-500) in play and no actual lands, all because of a $2 card.

On this particular Thursday, I fire up a league (five best-of-three matches). My goal for the last five months has been to go 5-0, which could get my deck list published on the site and make everybody in the Magic community know my name (or ice_nine‘s name at least). And that recognition—for actually figuring something out that none of the other hundred thousand players could—was what I dreamed about.

  • Match 1: I play against a blue-black-red deck that’s quite popular in the current metagame. It’s a good matchup for me, because they rely heavily on artifact cards and my ace-in-the-hole Suppression Field just shuts those artifacts down completely. I win in three games.
  • Match 2: Same deck archetype, I win in three games.
  • Match 3: Same deck archetype, I win in three games.
  • Match 4: I play against a red-green Ponza deck, another popular archetype, which combines efficient creatures with some land destruction cards (a fraction of the 30% that comprised my deck).4 It’s close, but I pull through in three.
  • Match 5: I play against a red Burn deck, which plays cheap bolts of lightning and spikes of lava to win as quickly as possible. It’s a bad matchup for me, but after falling in Game 1, for both of the next two games I lock them out of resources just before they can deliver the finishing blow. I call my brother over from preparing for his medical school interview tomorrow (he ends up getting in) to witness this historical moment. I win.

This victory is followed by the decklist being posted on the official Magic: The Gathering website a few days later, and a re-posting on the Magic sub-Reddit which gets a special shout-out and—on account of its unconventional play style—draws the interest of several players, and a few notable streamers.

In particular, FluffyWolf2—who averages about 100 viewers per stream—streams this for several straight weeks. And SaffronOlive, the head of the pre-eminent Magic pricing site MTGGoldfish, streams it once to over a thousand viewers. With my Magic Online friend, mana d0rk, I start a Discord channel that grows to 30-40 members in just a few days.

Even at the time I knew that LIBOR & Taxes still had a long way to go to get to the top tier, let alone break the metagame, and would likely never get there. But what I was able to prove through this whole experience—that I was capable of creating something innovative, in a completely saturated field, that broke established norms and truly spoke to other people—was pretty damn good.

  1. As a side note, the first ever LIBOR-based transaction, done by the Shah of Iran, took place the same day as the opening night of Woodstock in 1969.
  2. Mostly because it can easily be manipulated by greedy bankers.
  3. It’s also a play on a 2019 speech by the NY Fed’s John Williams, where he (optimistically) stated: “Some say only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes. But I say there are actually three: death, taxes, and the end of LIBOR.”
  4. The well-known Ponza nickname was dubbed in 1996, from the name of the favorite Wisconsin pizza place of the original deck’s creator. It’s what inspired me to create an even more ridiculous nickname for my deck.