The surface the mat in on makes a big difference too. My sew group had the large Sullivan's mat that covered the table where we met. No one could make a decent cut on it using all types of cutter. We changed meeting room and the mat was taken and put on another table mostly to protect the table. Amazingly there wasn't any problems cutting on it. We only thing we could figure out was the old table had a slight give on the surface when we tried to cut.