Sonic Advance 3 allows you to pair any of the 5 characters (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Cream, and Amy) with any other. This means there are 20 possible teams in the game, all of them with their unique traits. For the purpose of brevity, each character will have appropriate abbreviations when naming a team.

• Sonic = S
• Tails = T
• Knuckles = K
• Cream = C
• Amy = A
• Any character = ?

While the tag actions depend solely on the support character (the list of tag actions are here), the lead character also gains or trades abilities depending on who they are paired with.

Teams are categorized by speed, power, and flight. This is shown in the upper-left corner of the screen during standard gameplay with either a S (Speed), P (Power), or F (Flight).

The type of team is determined by if sonic or knuckles are in your team, as they have the dominant traits. If Sonic is in the team, then the team is automatically speed. If Sonic is NOT in the team, but Knuckles is, then the team is automatically power. If neither Sonic nor Knuckles are in the team (in other words, if Cream or Tails are in the team and Sonic and Knuckles are NOT), the team is flight.

• Speed teams can enter boost mode, either by running for a period of time, hitting a boost pad, or using Sonic's Tag Action
• Power teams can break power barriers, and also take 2 hits to destroy some normal barriers instead of 4.

The "exceptions" to the above rules are S+K and K+S. These are speed teams, but they also have power attacks because both sonic and knuckles are in the same team, so this team has traits from both speed and power.

The team type is honestly a meaningless label aside from the rules above. For example, while S+T can enter boost mode, they can still fly using Tail's air tag action.

Sonic & Tails

• Boost Mode
• Tails Tag Action
• Can trick off springs and ramps
• B = skid attack

This is a well-balanced starting team that adapts well to many scenarios casually. Access to boost mode, along with Tail's height-reaching tag actions and tricks off springs, makes this a team well suited for speedrunning vertical levels with boost pads. A key example is Ocean Base 1.