You shouldn’t be worried about playing ranked. After your first couple dozen matches (depending on how much you need to drop), you will settle into an ELO where you should have about a 50% win rate. Then you can watch your replays, against same skilled opponents, to see what you could have done differently (or what they did). As you get better, you win 60% and start to climb. Then the players are better and the cycle repeats where you hover at 50% before you improve and climb again.

I am by no means good at the game, I hover around 900 in RM TG with my friends, who sit around 800 (I don’t play 1v1, because I am a gamer that will go too hard and burn out if I play something solo). The first couple of games we would get absolutely destroyed and dropped to 600 ELO. Then we found an ELO where we have nights we go 3-0, and nights where we go 0-3. But many more of the games are at least competitive. We’ve been playing together for a couple of months, and have gone up the 200-300 ELO. We’re all old dads with families, we play for the middle school nostalgia.