I’ve been skating 8.25s thinking of sizing up. The baker seemed fine. It was mellow and flat and I might have to keep skating them. Most decks from the side are a straight line then at the kicks it dips down then comes up to make the kick. The baker dipped down a lot and then was mellow. So when I skated it my back foot always felt closer to the ground than my front foot.
The scumco deck from the side doesn’t really dip down before the kicks. There’s not really pockets on the deck. 3 fingers of flat on the nose and the tail. It’s perfect
I just didn’t know if there’s brands that are making stuff like that. Quasi is hit or miss because the steep nose. There’s a lot of brands I hsvnt tried and woodshops change. Like flips used to be flat but are they still?
The best thing would be going somewhere you can stand on a lot of boards, but as that is not always an easy option, some places will have details and concave angles, heights, etc (as was said by TwisT)
Already noted too that one company might have a "mellow" board which will actually still be steeper than another company regular board, so the stand on them would be easiest to feel them out.
As for sizes, I know a lot of the 8 feel flat to me, then 8.25 feel fairly good overall with decent concave, then a lot of the 8.38 size actually feel flatter for some reason and the 8.5 are again fairly good, but this is going by riding a lot of Real decks (same as Krooked, Antihero, Baker, etc)
Brands that I feel have less concave besides Baker also include Passport, Magenta, USA made Toy Machine and others I will add when I can stand on a few more boards.
The parking the car on the end of a board overnight really does flatten out the kick of a deck too, so you can always just do the nose if it feels too steep. I tried it and it does work. Just put something under the board so it is not just on concrete garage floor.