If you're looking for a new deck this season but can't decide which board suits your riding style, join the club. With so many innovations lately, it's easy to get confused, dismiss, or even worse, be fooled by the hype.

Simply put, with snowboards these days you're basically dealing with two different kinds of boards, made two different ways. There are the freestyle (park) or freeride (all-mountain) boards. Each type is chiefly defined by shape and flex pattern, and by traditional camber versus reverse camber. Of course, these new shapes and constructions have been crossbred by various companies, to varying degrees of success, leaving the consumer with a sometimes difficult choice. Every board has benefits and drawbacks, but chances are that any downsides will affect you far less than the advantages that complement your riding style. Here's where we come in: to explain who each board will suit best, and under what conditions each excels.

Each board that follows was handpicked by the editors with construction, shape technology and design in mind. Associate Editor Tawnya Schultz treated the boards to a winter shredding with today's most progressive female riders from the BC backcountry to the Tahoe parks; Editor-in-Chief Chris Owen traveled the world with a quiver in hand, dropping lines with Terje among others; and Senior Editor Nate Deschenes basically bad-mouthed all of them until he had a full plate of words to eat at the end of the season. The result is a comprehensive look at 15 different boards ridden by three very different snowboarders.

What we found is that you don't need to break the bank to get a board that rides like a champion. We found that sometimes a rail board works surprisingly well in the powder, and that, yes; there actually is a big difference between reverse and regular camber. There are the old standbys – shapes and constructions that simply cannot be denied — and there are innovations that will shape the way snowboards are developed in the future. You will find boards here made specifically for the pipe, boards that destroy entire mountain ranges, and even ones that turn into a pair of skis (to your benefit we think). There are boards geared specifically toward women and boards made to spend more time on concrete ledges than snow. Hell, we'll even go as far to say there are boards specifically designed to actually snowboard on.

What you have here is the best of the best according to SNOWBOARD Mag, the Platinum Picks. —- The SNOWBOARD Crew