Street Fighter.
MoBAs.
Hearthstone
Magic.
Any game involving choice/composition with a variable metagame forces you to play the best thing possible. Creativity/Cool things can sometimes work, but once they work, they're going to be adopted by the masses and be the standard issue thing.
Real Life Example: Esper Dragons. James and Shaheen blew people out with this deck. People were dumb and only CFB noticed, and CFB rocked people at the PT with it. Then people noticed CFB's results, and suddenly it's now the highest-% deck in the metagame.
You have to play to win. You have to learn to rip your heart out, stomp it on the ground, and play with the weapon that you feel is best at eviscerating your opponent.
If you don't like that style of play (and you really don't seem to), you probably shouldn't be trying to play hardcore competitive. A format like Legacy/Vintage gives you a lot of free wins against less-skilled competition btw, simply by knowing the format/interactions better, (its why people are more consistent on that side of the SCG circuit, along with availability issues), so I suspect you're seeing that effect when you play those formats online.
I actually feel that trying to teach people to build their own decks is a bad idea if they're starting to play competitively. Tier-whore and copy until you figure out WHY this stuff's working, then try to create it yourself.