I think playing conquest trains you for ladder because if you don’t learn how to snap correctly you end up wasting your time on 1 cube games. If you want to end conquest matches quickly, you have to learn to snap correctly to press your advantage and pressure the opponent to give up more cubes. Once you do that, approaching infinite ladder is much easier because you will be able to aggressively snap on players who have no idea what your deck does. If you rely on surprise with your deck like you say, you should be trying to get 4 to 8 cubes from the first round of conquest, since your opponent hasnt seen your deck yet.