This is my opinion of the best characters and their variants:
plants:
- corn: BBQ corn
- Citron: Toxic citron/Iron citron
- rose: Druid rose
- peashooter: Fire Peashooter
- cactus: Future Cactus/Zen cactus
- chomper: Hot rod chomper
- sunflower: Vampire sunflower
sorry though I don't have much zombie character variants so I can't judge them properly...
