>>53445489You're half right. Incineroar WAS the designated shill starter of Gen 7 which is why it got all the promotional stuff when the gen was new, as TCPI picks one Pokemon (or a few in Gen 7's case) to promote for the generation, as seen with Lucario and Greninja. After the gen actually came out, Incineroar was mogged extremely hard by the owl which is why, as
>>53444109 said, they stopped promoting Incineroar and Decidueye started getting stuff like alt forms and spinoff appearances, culminating in it getting an event raid in SV with the other shillmons, cementing its place..
TCPI generally guesses right when it comes to which Pokemon to shill, Lucario caught on, Greninja caught on, Cinderace didn't do bad... Weed cat is in a really good position as the only other Gen 9 starter that gets any attention is Fuecoco, Skeledirge isn't popular and the duck crashed and burned really hard.
It's really only with Incineroar and Zoroark that TCPI messed up and even Zoro is still popular enough, just not shillmon popular.
>while Incineroar got picked for SmashCase in point, how does something get into fucking Smash Bros and still wind up less popular than not one, but two forms of a starter that didn't?
In regards to Meowscarda, this would be like if we had all the weed cat shilling we do now, but Quaxly was inexplicably more popular at every turn. Incineroar was a flop.