I am a little late to the party, so I will repeat a lot that has already been said. But this card really intrigued me.

For me it is really hard to quantify an effect like her's or Grotesque Statue's. When it comes to probabilities I have learned that my guts are usually wrong. So I like to confirm or refute my instincts by using my mediocre programming skills.

Those statistics assume Father Mateo ( = auto pass), but should be able to be adjusted to fit any chaos bag and investigator.

My findings are the same as already posted by others:

• Olive increases your chances for very hard skill checks
• Olive increases the chances for very easy skill checks
• Olive decreases your chances for medium skill checks
• Olive "adds new chaos tokens" to the bag. What I mean by this is if you only have -1, -2, -3, -4 and -6, when using Olive you have a chance of "drawing" -5, -7, -8, -9, -10.

What the graph is bad at showing is that with Olive you always have a ~21% chance of drawing the . Which in the case of Father Mateo means free actions/resources and cards.

One thing I was really surprised by was the significant difference (~10% points) there is in the order of usage between:

• Olive and on her last token Grotesque Statue
• Grotesque Statue and on its last token Olive

After playing around with this a bit more, it seems like Ritual Candles have quite a big effect on Olive. If my understanding that Ritual Candles can be triggered twice if both chosen tokens are , , or is correct, this pushes Olive above just regular token draws in every situation with the added benefit of increased chances to find that one token you want (aka ) or avoiding the one you don't want (aka ).

Mary + Olive mcbride + Blessed Blade

Shockingly consistent support fighter who routinely just handles enemies that by all rights she has no business beating, throw in blessing of Isis, Paradox covenant or any other "when you draw an X" card and just watch the fireworks.

And even if that all fails, you are still just flooding the bag with blessing for your team anyway.

Blessing turn Olives weird probability of success into an autowin magnet, outside of Mary's style combining Olive and ancient covenant is a scary combo.

Olive Mcbride is a half-decent asset. Her shtick has been mathed into oblivion by better smart guys then I so I wanna add my practical 2-cents to the mix.

A note on the math: Numerical statistics aside, Olive guarantees that you cannot draw a particular token when you don't want to. This means that She's actually great when you're beating the test by +5 or +6 anyway to account for every token in the bag. Think of it this way: The worst token in the bag is , if you're putting lots of power into a test to get to +5/+6 then you can use her to ensure that the doesn't ruin your big swing, you'dd need truly awful luck to pull something like a -4, -5 and an in a single Olly trigger, heck you can even spend extra to account for this particular situation. In short, Olive McBride is good when you do really big skill checks.

Olly is however obviously bad outside her buddy-buddy investigators, namely Jimmy and Mateo. Generally though she isn't all that good for them, Jim's ability does good work even when she's not around and no campaign has enough skulls in the bag to warrant madly pulling tokens out for the fun of it. I'm a bigger fan of her for Father Mateo since she greatly increases the rate at which the shows up and that is good for us, in a pinch you can dig for the too for his 1/scenario ability. For Mateo especially she's good since you can trigger her on the occasional , or treachery that you don't think you're likely to succeed on, either you fail the test anyway or draw an for great profit.

My biggest negative realization about Olive McBride, and the reason I wanted to try her in the first place, is that I figured that she'dd increase my success chance at +-0 with Jim or Mateo, the fact is that she does'nt, all too often i'dd try at +-0 and the first token I drew was just plain 0, only to be followed by some minuses, failing the test. Also, attempting tests with Olly as Mateo at -1 or less, hoping to beat the test with an , is a waste of time, this very much broke the card for me so I've stopped playing it for now.

Second note on the math: Olive McBride has a funny success curve, don't trigger her when you're +1 or +2 over the skill check. Personally I quit using her at +3 (too many 2x(-2)'s!). If you're Jim then +3 or higher is the ideal spot to trigger her to net increased success rate, Mateo should go for +4 before triggering her.

Final note. As a practical note. Olive does interact nicely with Counterspell, Defiance, Hypnotic Gaze, and other stuff that manipulates or interacts with the token bag, but the very very best card in this interaction is Recall the Future. Normally you use Recall the Future to name a token that you can then use Recall the Future to cover, say trying a test at +2 and naming the -3. With Olive McBride you can name the most common token in the bag and draw a bunch of tokens, your chances are now multiplied to find the +2 bonus and game the test ("Oh, I drew a 0, -3 and -4, but I named the 0 with both copies of Recall the Future so I beat the test!"). This tactic is then a good complement to Father Mateos ability and his ability to start with 2 copies of Recall the Future in his deck.

With Jaqueline and Voice of Ra, it’s now possible to play big money mystic. When before you would have to sacrifice or play a lot of alchemy, now you can play Olive, use Jaqueline’s ability, and get 6-10 bucks reliably. Get that card back with prescient and your mirror of scrying to guarantee you get to play it three or four times a game, and you can play all the expensive spells you want. It’s completely possible to play Miss McBride and not use her for skill checks, only from cards that require you to draw tokens. And she even helps with Jaqueline‘s weakness!

It’s always good to have a spotter when you’re predicting the future.

I've been playing Olive in a Jim deck for Carcosa, and...my experience hasn't been very good.

The numbers on the card are the best parts. 2 resources for 3 Horror soak is great. But I don't think that's worth the slot on its own, as Mystics traditionally have lots of options for Horror mitigation.

Her ability is underwhelming. On standard difficulty, you're likely to draw something like (-1), (-2), . "Great!" you think, "I avoided the tablet!" But, because of how math works, you've drawn a -3 instead. So what? You just have to commit cards or whatever until you're 3-up or 4-up on the difficulty. Well, why not just draw a single token if you're 4-up on the test?

My beef with Olive is this: in order to use her, you have to compensate for the moderate negative value you're likely to draw, but by doing so, you no longer have a statistical advantage by using her.

Now, she combos pretty well with Song of the Dead and Defiance(2). But now you've got a combo piece in your deck that doesn't do much on her own except offer Horror soak. And you're unable to play other allies like Arcane Initiate, Peter Sylvestre, or David Renfield.

The Jim deck I've been playing beats tests because it has 3 extra (0)s in the bag (the ). I can essentially under-commit on tests because I'm likely to succeed at 2-up or even 1-up. Using Olive actually requires me to commit more to my tests than I would otherwise. So it's only helpful when I'm using Song of the Dead, but then it's only 1/turn, and even then it's far from guaranteed to draw that .

The best case use I can see for the witch who'll try anything once is in conjunction with Lucky!, as that allows you to react to the swingy-ness of the double token draw. You drew (-2), (-3), ? Well, you were only 3-up on the test, but you can succeed anyway! But then again, isn't that just a testament to how good Lucky is?

First off, 4 soak for 2 resources is a pretty great deal; she ties with Bulletproof Vest and Elder Sign Amulet for cost-to-soak ratio, but she's level 0 and occupies a slot that's not heavily contested for most Mystics. Her icons aren't terrific, but at least they're relevant for Mystics.

In my opinion, this makes her look pretty strong in most mystic decks, even before we consider her ability. We can only use it once per round, unlike Grotesque Statue, but we can use it to guarantee success in the same way, even though it's a little more difficult.

Where we really see Olive's strength is when we combine her ability with any of the chaos token manipulators already available to Mystics. If we chuck Defiance on the same test, we can hunt for the symbol we've just negated; likewise, we can choose a terrible symbol and then use Counterspell to pass the test. With the Seal mechanic we can make these results even more likely, and with Jim Culver we already have tokens that we can ignore.

I think Olive is crazy good in a Jim deck, but she's not half bad for any mystic that plans to manipulate the bag.

The artwork of this card is sooo cool. And here you are an interesting tip: the woman painted on this card is a real ffg employee. Does anyone know any other card with such background? Let's gather collection!

Something not covered is the interaction between Olive McBride and Dark Prophecy.

If you play Dark Prophecy, and choose to use Olive McBride on the first token drawn, (Say, for arguments sake, a skull, -5, and auto-fail), you choose the skull and -5. Now it comes to choosing from the 5 revealed dark prophesy tokens, one of which is the Double-olive-token. Dark Prophecy can only choose from the 5 individual specifically named tokens. But it does have the advantage of reducing the chance of only having auto-fail.