God, I completely forgot that card existed. You're 100% right, if any grass deck works in the upcoming format, it'll be in great part because of Lilligant. My only concern is that as an evolution itself, it's not really a setup monster for that critical turn one, like Miraidon for instance, that can come down turn one and immediately set your basics up. With Lilligant you have to have had a solid turn one, managing to put at least 2 basics other than the basic Lilligant itself on the field, so you can turn 2 use the Vstar's ability and start evolving everything. I'm afraid it'll be too swingy, and your deck's performance will vary greatly depending on whether you have that sweet turn one or not. Then again, one could argue that this is true for any setup heavy, evolution based deck, but the point is the other decks that are like this still seem to have better setup tools at their disposal.
You also have Leafeon V, which allows you to turbo an Energy into play on turn 1. It can also evolve into Leafeon VSTAR, but that card is less of an essential and more of a tech. It could be situationally useful if you want to play Boss/Serena and, say, Gardenia, on the same turn, but given the fact you need a way to search it out (and searching out Evolution Pokémon isn’t as cheap as it used to be when the best options require two hand discards or a 50% chance at searching out a basic instead), most players would opt to leave it out. (Of course, you can also search it out with Hisuian Lilligant VSTAR’s power.) One incentive to run a wider range of Gust effects is the possibility of pinging a benched Pokémon
ex or
V, then dragging it out and taking an easy two prizes. This would leave your opponent’s active Pokémon untouched and able to take a revenge KO, however. The irony is, given the size of these “stage 2 blimps” (as one Pokébeach member whose name I can’t remember most aptly named them), some opponents might respond to this strategy in like kind, gusting up a benched Hisuian Lilligant VSTAR or Leafeon V to take the same number of prizes on a more manageable target. Or perhaps they would ignore the two-prizers completely and target them evolving basics and stage 1’s.
I also realized you could use Cherrim to accelerate Energy onto a Floragato before evolving it into Meowscarada
ex, but then you’re running another evolution line, and you still need to have the Energy in hand. I’m guessing Cherrim variants, if viable, could dispense with Leafeon V/VSTAR, but they would probably be a little slower, since you’d have to set up multiple evolution lines before things started to move quickly, instead of having an Active Meowscarada
ex with two energy and a benched Sprigatito or Floragato with one Energy already attached.