Project Sawmill

Hello and welcome to this presentation of Project Sawmill, a fun little resource denial deck I built when the Escalation spoilers came in. I hope you appreciate the frankly tremendously clever pun in the name.

Game Plan

So this deck is not really a kill deck, despite the abundance of net damage. You may have noticed that "active" damage sources such as Neural EMP or Ronin are missing. That is because the goal of this deck is not necessarily to flatline the runner, at least not as part of its main goal.

So what is this deck then?

It's an extremely potent denial deck that, with a bit of luck, can lock Runners out of servers entirely. Generally speaking, there are two ways you will win with this deck:

• Lock them out. If you're playing against a Paperclip Andy (or other Runners who use Paperclip / Black Orchestra without backup breakers), this should be your primary goal. Either wait for them to overdraw and trash their breakers themselves, or snipe them from the top of their deck with PU's ability. Then, play Ark Lockdown or Blacklist and enjoy your impenetrable servers.

• Grind them out. This is more reliable than the previous way, because it works against every Runner. Force them into runs often, guarantee some net damage with Shocks, Snares, the Hokusai Grid, Fetals, HoKs and your damaging ice. With PU, their stack will be empty in no time, because they also have to constantly draw to not get too close to a random flatline. While this is happening, use Ark Lockdown / Blacklist to prevent recursion. Locking down some Levys for example is fantastic. Eventually you will come to a point in the game where the Runner's stack is empty and they have 3 or less cards in hand. From that point on, either pray for them to hit a Snare, or score some HoKs / place some Fetals to seal the deal.

I should note that this deck is extremely high variance, depending not only on your matchup, but also on the damage / PU trashes you get. Its worst matchup seems to be stealth Shaper, since they can break all your ice for effectively no cost. The best matchups are decks that run Paperclip / Black Orchestra without other breakers, especially out of Criminal.

Hope you have some fun playing this! Hit me with your feedback if you have any.