As a tangent, there has recently been drama with AI and Pokemon Showdown because someone trained a bot (using standard reinforcement learning + a rewrite of the Pokemon battle engine to Rust for max self-play parallelism) that is apparently good enough to get to the top of the leaderboard.

Did you try out different reasoning levels? Wondering if messaging is basically a proxy for additional reasoning

what was the selection for the teams? random per round? how does it play against people in ladder?

Pokémon Showdown isn't a game so much as it is competitive Wiki reading.

Jev will give better results on this kind of thing.