How does one begin designing a team?
>>25677030
Be a Karenfag and pick your favourites
Depends on what kind of team. If it's just the classical 2 sweepers, 2 walls, 1 lead and 1 whatever model, just pick the best mons to assign to those roles while being mindful of shared weaknesses.
make a list of your favorite mons
pull out some viable ones
go to smogon for a generic moveset
adjust to your liking
>pick a pokemon/core you want to use
Or
>pick a concept you want to use
Or
>pick something you hate and >>25677048
then pivk a pokemon that can beat it
Go to usage stats of your tier and copy Pokemon from the top 20.
Choose a Pokemon or core you like and start building around it.
>>25677089
Ok, but how do I build around it? Do I just pick pokemon that cover it's type weaknesses? In what ways can I support my core?
>>25677117
I go into ms paint and draw a graph of what I started with, what synergizes well with it, and so forth.
2 physical sweepers
1 special sweeper
1 physical wall
1 special wall
1 spinner/defogger/hazard setter
>>25677117
Let me put you an example. Let's suppose you want to use.. M-Ampharos. You need to have some viable switch ins to shit it can't beat (and that it can beat) , and, support to make it viable. But fist, you need to decide how will you use it. MAmpharos is slow, so a trick room team would work with it. Bronzong can use TR and has good type synergy with it, so you now have two mons. Since you are running TR, may as well have another setter just in case. A bulky water can help you with fire and ice switch ins, so slowking /slowbro sounds good.
At this point, you ev your Mons with an objective : to survive something or to ko something, you want to get the best of the two worlds. Priorize surviving if you actually can, and with TR, you need to.
There, you have a TR defensive core. You need to get a bit more offensive, so you check common TR mons and pick something. Check also common TR counter measures (clerics are common, and like to carry protect. Taunt, powerful priority...) and prepare against It. Check other trick room teams on smogon or Nugget Bridge or showdown or wherever you can. Test stuff.
At last, just in case, you put something fast or with priority in case you need to clear the field or need to kill something specific..
The basic idea is that you pick what you want to use and try to pair it with stuff that you can switch out to, or, that can kill what it kills It.
Choose a pokemon you really like. Then find some teammates that support it. For instance, if Mawile is one of your favorite pokemon, it's most viable in VGC with Trick Room support, so you'd be looking at using Cresselia or Aromatisse (ability makes it immune to Taunt, so awesome) to get the Trick Room going.
Or if your favorite pokemon happens to be Pinsir, you'd be looking to play Smogon OU, where Mega Pinsir is most viable. Pinisr does great with both keeping Stealth Rock on opponent's field, and rocks off of your field, so you'd be looking at something like Forretress or Skarmory for hazard support/control, plus something to stop enemy Talonflames that would threaten your bug bro, like Slowbro or Tyranitar.
Not OP, but I'm similarly building my first competitive team for doubles. I want my core to be M-Lopunny and CM Latias. What might be a good direction for that?
>>25677030
Pick one pokemon, for example: Mega Metagross
What counters that pokemon? For Mega Metagross it's mostly Bulky Waters and Grounds. Depends on what moves you want to give it. You might use a Ground-type like Serperior.
Serperior and Metagross both dislike Fire-types like Talonflame, Entei and Heatran so you might want to use a Fire-type that can deal with them, like Slowbro
And then you keep doing that and playtest
Build whatever team you want to get out of ELO hell, any battles before you hit at least 1300 or 14000 rating are just stupid bullshit with shitmons like shuckle or chimcholio or some shit on every team
>>25677030
>ingame
pick whatever you want.
>romhacks
pick whatever you want as long as it's balanced around each other
>PvP
find out what playstyle you want to do (hyper offense, balance, stall, etc)
find out the top threats to whatever tier you are playing
pick pokemon that can handle said top threads
pick pokemon that have synergy with each other.
>>25677334
thats a real shit way of building desu.
