Introduction
After the gallade ban, cacturne has slowly risen in popularity as a very solid wallbreaker in the march metagame. Despite it's fairly weak defensive stats and low speed, cacturne has carved a niche for itself with it's solid 115 attack stat combined with access to stab sucker punch and knock off. Water absorb is also a massive boon for cacturne. This ability alongside it's dark typing provide 2 extremely useful immunities in this meta, giving it a surprising amount of defensive utility on offensive teams alongside its wallbreaking capabilities.
Part I
Offense Choice band cacturne can prove very difficult to switch into, with its coverage allowing it to hit the entire metagame for neutral damage. It has access to sucker punch, knock off and seed bomb as reliable stab options. Zen headbutt allows it to punish galarian weezing attempting to switch in. Drain punch is another option, allowing it to hit regice, opposing cacturne, and persian. With these coverage options, switching into cacturne is a guessing game that nearly no team wants to play repeatedly.
Part II
Defense With good prediction, cacturne is able to switch in freely on water type attacks from swampert, tatsugiri, politoed, and samurott as well as psychic type attacks from farigiraf and mesprit and threaten them out with its powerful stabs. This allows it to completely nullify otherwise dangerous threats and retaliate with it's own hard hitting attacks.
Part III
Counterplay As is the nature of choice items, banded cacturne is highly prediction reliant, and it's mediocre bulk and speed leave it lacking other viable options. It also cannot run every move it wants, usually leaving it vulnerable to either regice or galarian weezing. It is also vulnerable to coverage moves from the mons it wants to switch in on, such as swampert running superpower or farigiraf running dazzling gleam, and its low speed allows it to be easily forced out once it has locked itself into a move.
Part IV
Sets Due to it's frailty and low speed, cacturne lacks many viable options aside from choice band. Swords dance can be used to allow cacturne to clean in the late game. However, there are a lot of metagame staples that need to be dealt with before this can work, such as ditto, ribombee, rotom-fan, and either weezing-g or regice depending on the set, and you will still need to win sucker punch mindgames against anything faster than cacturne. It is the only spikes user in the tier but unfortunately again, it's stats just are not good enough to use the move effectively. Also, due to the abundance of flying types and levitate users, having access to spikes is not generally worth the drawback of having a utility cacturne on your team.
Written by Shifty