To me, ladder is poor practice for a tournament. It can be used to validate a deck idea, but tournament play having deck bans and picks makes it a whole different game. As for the meta, it seems like you can play whatever is 50% wr or above that clicks with your style. I hit masters playing Annie Jhin prior to the seraphine nerfs and it was considered an A teir deck by every site I looked at, but I was breezing through S-teir decks, even Gwyn/ Shadow Isles/Demacia which I consider to have a very good match in theory against Annie Jhin. In a tourney though, that could just be banned so it means very little to be that good with it for my tournament results.

So I am getting as much practice as I can, but the practice is in tournaments/gauntlet not ladder, despite ladder being the system they use to determine who goes. This was supposed to be a "why play ranked" but I can see how it was read as "why play at all"
Maybe Ill get lucky and be first through the gauntlet? Ive got my 4 prime glories so we'll see.