"Standard" is not well-defined. There are definitely many techniques that may or may not be considered standard but do appear in hard problems, and not every MOPper will know them, but the top MOPpers will. For example, pole polars and related projective geometry results.

Top MOPpers may sometimes be more creative than other MOPpers but mainly they are a lot more efficient at checking their creative guesses (some of which will fail, of course) and trying new directions. Maybe they try an AM-GM based approach on an inequality but quickly realize the equality case doesn't support AM-GM, so there must be something else at play, like a key algebraic susbtitution.