For me I'd say pure spy for 1 you can go undetected if you ever were spotted you can just bank up on potions and you can't lose the most valuable gold you have btw I've been pure spy long time now although you get undetected I'd say either hansel or hybrid build which is made up of same numbers of guilds and attack builds because you have 2 ways of making gold which is by troops and spies it's also good for epic battles.
A true hansel build is great and very tough to beat but to compete with t4 builds it needs at least a couple tril in allies. How many hansel builds have you seen lately that have the ally bonus needed to compete. I have personally only seen one.
I can't remember the name. He only had a t1 attack build and I had to be at full strength with a 1.3mil attack to get trough
I feel mixed, you guys keep saying we can be attacked by everyone, but all we need is a few defense towers, pots, and some stormy defensive allies for each spot and we're good to go. Another thing about mixed builds is that we can attack both pure spies and pure attack. With a pure attack we use our spies to assassinate and then hit and we can always scout bomb a pure spy after attacking to give you time before he can hit at full strength. Just my opinion
I personally don't know much of attack builds I reset at 400k combined, but spy build was much easer to deal with pesky farmers in the early levels, and the one attack building helps in rw just by keeping yourself dtw. I like spy build so far but I am not very educated on the attack builds
At my stats i get 26m a hit from ally plunder, in pw i get about 600m an unload, hansel has much better plunder
The professional way is to build all defense building. Upgrade all of them. Later, start building a building that adds your attack, so that you could do quests.