The moment the deal was struck, Laban moved fast. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan describes him that same day separating out every goat marked on its feet, every spotted one, every one with even a patch of white on its coat, and every black lamb — and handing them all over into the keeping of his sons (Genesis 30:35).
Read the verse slowly. The agreement said Jakob would take the streaked and spotted animals as wages. Laban's response was to remove all of them before Jakob could lay hands on them. Not into Jakob's flock. Into his own sons' custody, three days' distance away.
It was the deception of a man who had already counted his winnings. Laban believed that if there were no marked animals in the flock Jakob tended, no marked animals could ever be born. He was, in his way, a closed-system thinker — unwilling to imagine that heaven could insert new variables.
The Maggid teaches: a cheat always plans against the world he can see. He never plans against the One who made it. Laban stripped the flock bare, then handed Jakob what looked like nothing — and heaven used that nothing as a seedbed.