Sixty-four Massachusetts banks should seriously consider finding a buyer in the coming years, and another 58 should look for a bank to acquire, according to a new white paper from the consulting group Invictus.

The report, "Bleeders and Leaders: Redefining the 2014 U.S. M&A Banking Market," sets out to define which banks should sell, which banks should buy and which banks would be fine doing neither, based on their asset mix and capital requirements in the wake of Basel III and the Dodd-Frank Act.

 "A bunch of banks are now caught in a very nasty trap. They’re weaker than before, capital requirements have gone up, margins have declined, competition has increased. They are like hemorrhaging patients; they came out of the war, they are alive, but they are trapped in this vicious cycle," said Invictus Chairman and CEO Kamal Mustafa.

To those banks Mustafa labeled "the walking dead," with an unfortunate combination of low capital and low earnings, his message is grim: "You are not going to get better … don’t sit there and hope for a miracle, because there are no miracles. Sell today. Bite the bullet, protect your shareholders and sell now."

On the flipside, Mustafa says banks with plenty of capital, but low return on assets, should consider seeking another bank to acquire. They probably can’t count on organic growth, he said.

But the situation Massachusetts is a little less dire than the one Invictus lays out for banks elsewhere. The state largely has its glut of mutual banks to thank for that, Mustafa said.

"A mutual bank doesn’t have shareholders screaming for profits," he said. They tend to be conservative, less aggressive. They might leave a lot of money on the table, but nobody’s slapping their wrist for it."

Mustafa anticipates a slew of mergers between mutual banks in the years to come, and for those banks that might be considering a merger of equals, he had a few words of wisdom: "When you look at each other, make sure you look at your asset profiles. Once you demutualize, you may find that one bank made a lousy deal because you had the wrong combination of assets," he cautioned. "You’ve successfully survived the recession; if you’re going to [merge], remember the rules of the game."