I recently setup some build plans at my company, and I like the branch management feature.

And I like the idea to automatically deploy to a development environment each night.
But I do not want all branch plans to be deploy, although I would like that to be optional (i.e. a manual stage).

This is how I've solved it now.
One plan with two stages and branch management enabled.
1) build/test and
2) deploy (manual stage)

Another plan with identical two stages, but the 2nd stage (deploy) not manual.

This allows me a nightly deployment for 'master' (automatically), and I can optionally start deployment from a branch plan.

What I would like is that I could select a stage to be either
1) Automatic
2) Manual
3) Automatic for default branch/Manual for branch plan

This would achieve what I would like to do in a single plan, which would of course be far more easier to administer than having two sets of identical plans.
Not to mention the overhead that a single VCS revision is actually built twice.