I feel like the ones with the really high points at lower tiers are either returning players or long-term players who have just started to pay attention to climbing tag arena ranks. Either way, these players clearly have better teams and more options than everyone on the current rank.
As you have more champions built, you'll have more ways to counter opposing teams on offense. That's how you naturally climb the ranks in tag.
Defense is also important- what teams do you use for defense?
A commonly used tactic in Gold I to IV is once you have 3 good teams that can compete, you set your defenses to 1 easy to beat champion each ( example 3 bullies ) , you will go down the ranks but you'll see plenty of other teams ( uisually full pages ) of 1 man teams, allowing you to farm them very quickly, people who have alot of points in short amounts of time do that and often spend some gems to buy tokens. Once you climb high enough to see full teams, leave the game a bit and people will farm you back to the lower tiers.
An important caveat to this strategy is that starting from firday or saturday you shoul dset back you strong defense, and you must be able to defeat the competition in order to stay in your tier or climb up to the next.
Gold IV has a wide range of points 2900+. I just try to stay in it to get the prizes. I am also trying to defeat as many as I can to win gold bars to get medals in the Great Hall, and maintain 20% bonuses.
I am not that strong so I wait until the 15 min free resets lay out some easy pickings. If you wait long enough you will get them. No way can I beat the wall of yellow and pink framed champs I frequently see, but many have set out the low strength defenses and those can be cleaned out. By the end of the week I can work my way from 2900 up to 3700-3900 just hitting easy ones.
Before that I felt doomed to stay in bronze forever.
I do not agree with the idea to let your score sink down too low, then you lose lots of bonus advantages.