so, I got Dipladenia after grinding the crap out of that perm reprint. even with her on my team racking 935 speed (she can't be evolved right now cause I have no pierce dragons) and a team of roughly 755.... 3rd stage still kept killing me. I ended up using the auto trick (to advance the first team) to win the 3rd stage, but if I had lilac on the 755 speed team, i might have been able to win.
as for the 4th stage, took a few tries, but this eventually worked for me:
first team is a mix of dodge, skill down, and iberis for the miss chance they were slowed down as much as possible. 2nd is just made to be as fast as possible.
2nd team got wiped out, but the first survived with only burning bush lost...