What "real Vintage decks" did you face? Was it just the one Gushbond list? If so, you clearly don't have the sample size to justify your conclusion that all competitive Vintage lists would stomp this.
I never said it was bad against "all competitive Vintage lists," just that it failed miserably against the one type of deck I was actually aiming for: blue control. That's where Earwig Squad should shine, no? And High Tide is definitely a tier 2 contender, at least as powerful (and vulnerable to the right hate) as Elf combo or Belcher.
Look, you said it was "turriblebad against actual Vintage decks", when you haven't played against "actual Vintage decks", you played against ONE. If you meant it sucked against blue control, you should have said as much. And no, I'm not counting High Tide. I haven't seen it in any discussions, I haven't heard of it making a decent finish in anything recent, and the last time I even heard of someone brewing up such a list was an old article from Smmenen (maybe 5-6 years ago?).
Oh, don't be so harsh. Vandal was an experiment that didn't pan out. My logic was I'd rather have additional power hate than another dork, but it turned out that the dork was more relevant. I won't run em anymore, of course.
When someone warns you against a course of action and you ignore their advice, you shouldn't complain when things turn out badly and they pull an "I told you so".
I don't run tutors becaue I've found, in an unpowered deck, that I usually do better just focusing on 4-of answers for consistency than for tutors. I've been in alot of situations where I just don't have the mana in the early game to tutor an answer AND play it with backup soon enough to matter. I'm not married to any of these decisions, a'course.
I think your logic is flawed here. Running playsets of your answers instead of running tutors doesn't make you consistent, it just increases the number of times you draw into blanks. Decks like MUD get away with that sort of thing because all their lock pieces are still lock pieces, and the entire game plan is built around them. Answers are narrower than threats, and for every time you save mana by naturally drawing the right answer, there will likely be several where you didn't need the card, and the tutor would have served you better.
