This guide was built with the most pragmatic, barebones, and effective perspective on teambuilding in mind. With a complex concept as teambuilding for competitive battling in the Smogon environment, I have paid special attention to brevity and made sure to include only what is necessary. On that note, one issue I see repetitively that I will eliminate in this guide is providing esoteric examples that create a scenario only the author understands. You better bet your ass this guide will not have this autistic drudgery. Some concepts and words are hyperlinked, so do not hesitate clicking on them to explore more about what I am trying to convey. Above all, stay passionate and persistent! Nothing worthy comes easily.
The primary objective of effective teambuilding lies in simply besting your opponent's. A Pokemon battle is a zero-sum game and each move is another opportunity to preserve your team's vitality, restore it, or press your advantage. There are a couple of schools of thought when it comes to this answering questions such as whether to optimize for maximum type-coverage or for threats in the metagame and even in the particular tier, but we will not go into this detail here.
This is another hotly contested topic, but I strictly see it in two ways that apply to all teams universally ignoring the various formations and focusing on a unified methodology. There are two types of teams: synergistic and independent. Synergistic teams focus on perfecting offensive and defensive type-coverage. As a consequence, losing a member of the team is devastating as it breaks the perfect coverage. Many of these types of teams tend to utilize varying levels of stall and always contain a healer, a status remover, and defensive walls. Often times the walls are the core of the team and are built around to ensure the concept of perfect coverage. Independent teams are built with tempo and leveraging powerful moves in mind. By nature, they are highly offensive because they have to be to make up for where they are lacking in; synergy. For this reason, they are also very modular meaning you may substitute a Pokemon out if another one is more effective. These types of teams have often been called hyper-offensive. They utilize Pokemon with high offensive capabilities and use moves such as Volt Switch or U-Turn in attempts to preserve tempo and attain a favorable position, again to compenstate for weak synergy.