440exforme, I am not quite as good as Matt seems to be but here is my thought on the subject. Gaskets are probably easier than decking however you are limited to what you can change because can only get so many different gasket thicknesses. I also do not much care for steel shim gaskets....They work I just don't like em. With decking you would not have this problem, but the big draw back with decking is that most of us do not have access to one of those plasma things Mike400ex talked about so once you cut it it's cut, but so what, you will always be able to get a piston to fit. If your measurments allow I would try to use honda bond or yamabond on the base gasket. I only decked mine I did not do the gaskets so I am not an expert on that but it should work. Now... if the gasket thing does not get you a nice .040" quench area, decking is the only way to go, and put the regular gaskets in. You can get cometics at pretty much every shop, but call cometic and ask them about compressed thickness for the head gasket....very important... As far as cam goes I used the TC GNCC cam and I like it I had a Rocky Ridge cross country cam on a 400 and it was good too but I think the TC is better. TC makes power everywhere. I had trouble getting a cam from tc though it took forever. As far as gas goes I fired up the 440 I'm talking about, this last weekend. It has a comp ratio of 10.8:1. We put cam2 in for the start up because we wanted to be on the safe side of detonation. In car motors 10.6:1 is pretty much ragged edge for pump gas, I know motorcycles can handle more because of the aluminum motors allow heat to be dissapated better. We are going to start weening it off of cam 2 while keeping a close eye to see if there are any problems. If you do all that we are all talking about here you will be pulling stumps and beating up your rev limiter in no time at all....it won't even seem like the same bike.
440exforme, I hope that is at least a little bit useful. Sorry, once I get going...... Any how good luck and do not forget to post DETAILED results for all of us to see.
1998 Banshee .060" over, Delta 2 reeds, Stage2 porting, 28mm Mikunis, Toomey T5's, Pro design cool head.