Holy shit that's pretty crazy. I'm guessing there were a lot of folks running those types of decks? I imagine it'd be a hell of a lot of fun though.
Lots of folks run crazy decks, but there is still a wide gulf in player skill. I have a friend that plays Azorius spirits in Pioneer, and he can consistently win bad matchups (e.g. Phoenix usually owns spirits) because he knows his deck inside and out. (Pioneer's equivalent in Arena would be Explorer, but it is missing a few cards that Pioneer has, making a few of the meta decks absent in Arena).
A good example of this was last Friday a Phoenix player cast spells to remove all the counters on his Thing in the Ice, which would bounce all other creatures. In response he played Slip out the Back on the Thing, phasing it out, and when the stack checked for Thing transforming on the battlefield the bounce doesn't resolve.
Another good example of this is Rakdos Midrange; it sees a lot of representation in tournaments despite not having the greatest win % because it's not a hard deck to pilot. Intermediate players can do fairly well with it. However, you need to be really good to pilot Izzet Phoenix, UW Control, Lotus Field Combo, etc.
You could give me an S tier deck with a good matchup % against
Mist
with a C tier deck and she'd probably beat me more often than not because I would make some misplays.
Like you, I rarely have time to play Arena. I make it to FNM's because it's social time and time to play mixed together (it's a tight knit bunch of 4-8 regulars mostly and most of us like to brew and try lots of off meta stuff). I would look into some budget decks before you blow through your wildcards.
P.s. I found out that if I mainboard 4 Lithomantic Barrages in BO1 standard, the algorithm rarely matched me against Blue decks. It's substandard against Green/Red/black but screw Blue sometimes
.
