TL;DR: Stephanie McMahon is the best GM to pick for long-term MyGM saves. Xavier Woods is the top pick for shorter or medium length saves.
WWE 2K23 introduced a range of new GMs (and changed some of the existing ones) within its beloved MyGM mode.
Each GM gets a unique power card that can be used once per season.
This tier list ranks every GM’s power card and breaks down how to use each one most effectively.
GM | Power Card | Description | Tier |
---|---|---|---|
Stephanie McMahon | The McMahon Presence | Earn twice as much from arena attendance this week | S |
Xavier Woods | Cheat Code | Permanently sign an opponent’s superstar next week | A |
Adam Pearce | Instigator | Increase all active rivalries by one level | A/B |
Tyler Breeze | Quick Recovery | Increase stamina by 20 on entire roster | B |
Sonya Deville | Power Up | Power cards in the store are free this week | C |
Mick Foley | Cactus Jacked | Injure two random superstars on opposing brand’s next show | C |
Eric Bischoff | Backstage Booking | Logistics booking costs are free this week | D |
Custom Superstar | Legend Whisperer | Sign a Legend for free | E |
Kurt Angle | Heart of Gold | All charity promos are free and results doubled for the week | F |
Kurt Angle
Kurt Angle is objectively the worst GM to pick in WWE 2K23 by quite a long way.
Kurt’s power card is called ‘Heart of Gold’ and allows you to book charity promos for free and get double results from them for the week.
Mathematically, this means you save $15,000 in a random week or $20,000 at a Premium Live Event (or PLE, the new name for PPVs). It also means you gain 15,000 or 20,000 additional fans.
Importantly, the math assumes you book every promotion slot with a charity appearance, meaning you miss out on call outs and self promos. It also reduces your show’s diversity as every promo will be the same.
The money you save is negligible, there’s no lasting benefit, and the additional fans you gain doesn’t come close to what the other GMs can offer.
Custom Superstar
Your custom superstar’s power card is the same as the card William Regal had in 2K22, the ‘Legend Whisperer’. This allows you to sign a legend for free on a 5 or 10-week contract (and you should always go for the latter).
Getting to sign a legend for free can be valuable. Hulk Hogan, the most popular legend in the game, costs around $130,000 to sign on a 10-week contract.
Potentially saving $130,000 for free is pretty handy and you can already see how it dwarfs the benefit of Kurt’s power card.
However, signing a legend ties you down to the future expense of needing to renew their contract – or you can release them but you’ll probably need to replace them with a free agent with lower popularity, less star power and no rivalries.
Also, legends don’t give that much benefit. They’re good, but you can perform just fine without them. And if you really want to sign one, keeping an extra $130,000 back from your draft budget is pretty easy.
Eric Bischoff
Eric Bischoff’s card, ‘Backstage Booking’, allows you to book all of your logistic costs for the week for free (not including unlock costs).
This is a pretty valuable card but it only becomes most valuable in later seasons.
In Season 1, you’ll unlock 5 arenas but only upgrade your crew, special effects and advertising once. Arenas are expensive but the latter three options only cost $10,000 – $15,000 each, so you’re saving $30,000 – $40,000 with Eric’s card in the first year.
As you progress through the seasons, Eric’s card becomes much more effective. However, it’s likely that you’ll be playing catch-up versus most other GMs.
By the time you get to make the most of your power card, you could already be 3 or 4 season wins behind.
If you’re committing to a 10-season (or longer) journey, Eric is a good pick.
Mick Foley
Mick Foley’s ‘Cactus Jacked’ power card randomly injures two superstars from an opposing brand’s next show. You choose which brand to target.
This card is good for a couple of reasons:
The first reason is the obvious one; you injure two superstars on a rival’s roster. The injuries are quite severe too as I’ve seen four, five and even six-week injuries dished out.
Having injured superstars for a long time can allow you to build up a healthy lead.
The second reason is that it makes your rival overthink – if it’s a human, of course. They might desperately scramble to put on a show without all of their top stars so that they don’t lose any of their most important wrestlers. This can cause bad free agent signings or just a bad show that gives you an advantage.
Where this card falls slightly flat is in future seasons.
If your opponent is good at managing stamina then they’ll never have any injuries. This means it’s likely that injury recovery power cards will have been accumulated over time and they can be used to recover any injured superstars.
Recovering a superstar removes them from a week’s show, though, and if it’s a six-week injury then they’ll have to use at least two cards over a two-week period to recover them.
This is a solid C-tier card.
Sonya Deville
Sonya, receiving a much-needed buff in this year’s edition of the game, has the ‘Power Up’ power card that makes all of the store’s power cards free for a week.
As three random power cards appear in the store on a weekly basis, the maximum you can get from this is three free power cards.
Sonya’s card is very situational.
Most weeks, there will be one or two cards that you might like to acquire – it’s rarely all three as there will be cards like ‘Superstars GM’ that boosts morale that are expensive nice-to-haves but you’ll never actually choose to buy them unless you’re rolling in cash.
And there will be zero cards that you’d like to pick up in many weeks.
A lot of this comes down to luck and the perfect situation to use it would be if an opponent had applied a double cost card to you in the same week that three amazing cards landed in the store (e.g. a Special Promotion, amongst other good cards).
In that situation, you’d save more than $300,000.
But it’s such an unlikely, specific situation that leaves too much to chance. It’s a great card given perfect timing, but it’s C-Tier overall.
Tyler Breeze
Tyler’s power card is ‘Quick Recovery’ and it immediately increases your entire roster’s stamina by 20.
This might not sound like a lot but it can have a significant and lasting impact that improves your shows over a 5 or 6 week period, which is over 20% of the season.
Think of this as an example:
You have two superstars with 60 stamina and you’re a full 5 weeks away from the PLE that you want them to appear at with a level 4 rivalry.
Because you know you want them to be on the PLE card, and you don’t want them to get injured (which is a risk when superstars fight with less than 40 stamina), you can only really put them in normal matches to build their rivalry up. Maybe one tables match.
Knowing that we have the Quick Recovery card, we can put the two superstars into an extreme rules match and then a tables match and we can still recover them back to 60 stamina. We can then put them in another extreme rules or tables match, and a normal match, and finish the rivalry with a big match type at the PLE.
This examples shows how your weekly shows can improve as a result of the stamina boost card.
Now imagine if this wasn’t done across one rivalry but across five or six instead.
This gives you weeks of boosted shows, helping you to bring in more fans than your rivals do for a prolonged period of time.
When used correctly, Tyler Breeze is a B-tier GM in WWE 2K23.
Adam Pearce
Adam Pearce’s ‘Instigator’ card returns from last year’s game and is an A-tier card – potentially B-tier, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Much like with Tyler’s card, having the ability to increase all of your active rivalries by one level can give you weeks of improved shows.
Using this when you have lots of level 1 and level 2 rivalries is when it’s most effective. This allows you to improve your shows week after week and build up some guaranteed level 3 and level 4 rivalries to peak at the PLE.
It’s easy to use this card, unlike Tyler’s which requires a little safer management, and is virtually guaranteed to win you more fans than opposing brands for successive weeks.
Bumping a range of level 3 rivalries into level 4 for a PLE also helps to boost a match-up’s hidden rivalry rating from 3-star to 5-star.
Xavier Woods
Xavier Woods’ power card ‘Cheat Code’ looks good on the surface but when you analyze it closely you quickly realize how great it is.
The Cheat Code card allows you to permanently sign an opponent’s superstar from their roster. They’ll join after one week, it can’t be used in the first week of the season and it can’t be used on title holders.
The benefit that this gives to your brand is big but the damage it can do to an opponent’s brand is potentially even bigger.
The most expensive superstars in the draft cost around $250,000 in the first season. With Xavier’s power card, you’re stealing $250,000 worth of value from an opponent’s roster and getting it for free.
On top of this, your opponent will have to spend more money to replace that superstar and will likely only be able to replace them with someone with lower popularity or they’ll have to spend a lot of money on renewing legend contracts.
In the second season and beyond, the value of this card increases.
The most expensive superstars in Season 2’s draft will be over $300,000 and the draft is more difficult to maneuver in. Stealing a superstar of this value helps make your draft easier and does a lot of damage to an opponent too.
The only reason Xavier isn’t the best GM in WWE 2K23 is because after a few seasons, money is a little easier to manage.
That, and our final GM is just a little bit better.
Stephanie McMahon
Stephanie McMahon is WWE 2K23’s best GM in MyGM. Her power card ‘The McMahon Presence’ doubles the income from arena attendance in the week you play it.
Assuming you wait until at least week 20 in the first season, after you’ve unlocked the fifth arena, the value of the card is an additional $340,000 in cash. You can spend it how you wish.
The main benefit of this card comes in Season 2 and beyond.
Getting to use this in the early weeks of future seasons is incredibly strong. After the draft, money will be tight for everyone…but not for Stephanie after it’s played in week 1.
After Season 5, the card’s value is a cool one million dollars of additional profit.
This means you’ll never be in money trouble, you can buy all of the power cards you’ll ever need, sign legends and easily renew their contracts, and max out your logistics every week.
It’s this future upside that separates Stephanie McMahon from Xavier Woods, putting her in the S-tier of GMs on her own.