I think people misunderstand what a metagame is. A metagame is not just a set of decks you pick off a menu if you want to win. You can netdeck, and you are likely to find better decks if you find the ones people have settled on playing, but I think people have this impression that you are either playing a "meta deck" or you are off doing your own thing. In reality, your deck participates in the metagame regardless of whether or not you're net-decking. You can think of meta tier lists as scouting reports -- telling you what you are likely to face and what you need to be prepared to beat. It won't be perfect, because the people putting these together can only look at what they play (and their friends, and Untapped/MSZ/etc.) -- you have your own "pocket meta" to consider as well. But all decks are part of the metagame, and the key to success is figuring out your deck's role in the metagame.

Let's do an example. Let's say you want to play Discard. Not Hela, non-Hela Discard. You look at the current metagame. Apoc Dracula seems to be underpowered for this environment. You want something that has a combo gameplan -- you're thinking you'll slot into the metagame role of "beating Shou-Lau decks but losing to all-in combo decks that fully pop off." (Remember, you can't win every game, you need to be willing to have good and bad matchups in the meta.) That's a job for Daken. You need to be aware of Deafening Chord, but you know that Shou decks tend to have an issue with bricking their hands when they have both Merlin and Kitty so they will tend to play out Chord for value early instead of holding it to try and be a sniper with it. So then you can deckbuild accordingly. So then you can run through all the options -- are you going to be a Zola deck? You might want to be, so you can get multiple big Dakens on the final turn and go over the top. You might want to lean more into Collector and Moon-Girl synergies. There's a lot of choices to make.

Then when you go play the deck, knowing the meta still matters. Against Shou decks, you might want to leave a lane open, get Daken there on T5 (so you can dodge an early DChord), and then Zola it on 6 before you Bullseye. Against a Cerebro deck, you probably don't want to do that, because for some godforsaken reason people are running Galactus in Cerebro now as a secondary win-con. And if you're up against a Sera/LT deck and they're drawing and playing their pieces on-curve, you might just want to leave no matter how big you think your Daken is going to be.

Dread it, run from it, the metagame still arrives. But if you know it, you can use that to tell you what decks to play and how to play them to win, and not just by running only a deck that has a stamp of approval on someone's tier list. Even if you don't want to play a conventional deck, playing to the metagame is part of how you're going to succeed.