Olive McBride
Versucht alles mindestens ein Mal

Vorteil. Verbündeter

Verbündeter. Hexe.

Cost: 2.

Mystiker
Health: 1. Sanity: 3.

Sobald du einen Chaosmarker enthüllen würdest, erschöpfe Olive McBride: Enthülle 3 Chaosmarker statt 1. Wähle 2 jener Marker, handle sie ab und ignoriere den anderen.

Du musst etwas von dir in jeden Zauber investieren. Manchmal ist dies wörtlich zu verstehen.
Aurore Folny
Das Herz der Älteren #197.
Olive McBride

FAQs

(from the official FAQ or responses to the official rules question form)
  • Clarification: When you use multiple effects that replace “revealing a chaos token” with something, else, you must first declare your intention so you are reacting to what you draw from the bag, because each of these effects are meant to be triggered before you draw tokens from the bag. If you declare you’re going to trigger Olive McBride's ability first, you should then declare which of the 3 tokens you’re about to reveal from Olive’s ability will be turned into 2 tokens from the Grotesque Statue (For example, “I’m going to reveal 3 tokens using Olive, and for the first token, I’m going to reveal 2 instead of 1 using my statue). Then you’ll ignore one of the 2 statue tokens, and be left with 3 total tokens, which you’ll then ignore 1 of. (All of these tokens are considered to be revealed simultaneously, so you are not allowed to reveal the first 2 tokens with Olive, and then decide whether or not to use the statue). If you instead trigger the statue’s ability first, you would do the same thing, declaring your intent. (For example, “I’m going to reveal 2 tokens using my statue, but for the second token, I’m going to use Olive’s ability to reveal 3 instead of 1”.) Then you would choose between resolving the first token or the 3 Olive tokens. (Here this may seem a little strange, because Grotesque Statue says “Choose 1 of those tokens to resolve, and ignore the other,” which implies that you only get to resolve 1 token and ignore 1 token, but for the purposes of resolving these types of effects, the 3 tokens revealed from Olive’s ability should be treated as 1 revealed token.) If you decide to resolve the 3 Olive tokens you would then choose 2 to resolve and resolve the other, as usual. - FAQ, v.1.3, May 2018

  • Clarification: If an investigator is instructed to “resolve” multiple revealed chaos tokens, any game or card effects which refer to “the revealed chaos token” in the singular should be construed to apply to each of the revealed chaos tokens. For example, when applying chaos symbol effects during Step 4 of a skill test or applying modifiers to an investigator’s skill value during Step 5 of a skill test, the effects and modifiers of all of the resolved chaos tokens should be applied, even though the rules state “the revealed chaos token.” Similarly, any card effects that refer to “the revealed chaos token” refer to all of the resolved tokens. For example: An investigator plays Premonition , which reads: “Put Premonition into play, reveal a random chaos token from the chaos bag, and seal it on Premonition.” That investigator then uses Olive McBride to “reveal 3 chaos tokens instead of 1, choose 2 of those tokens to resolve, and ignore the other.” In this case, both of the resolved tokens would be sealed on Premonition, even though Premonition only refers to the revealed token as a singular token. Likewise, when Premonition instructs that investigator to “Resolve the token sealed here as if it were just revealed from the chaos bag,” the investigator should resolve both of the tokens sealed on it. Additionally, when resolving multiple chaos tokens, any game or card effects which trigger if a certain chaos token is revealed—such as the text “If the named chaos token is revealed during this skill test…” on Recall the Future—will trigger if any of the resolved chaos tokens meet the specified conditions. Such an effect will not trigger twice if two of the designated tokens are resolved. Note that this entry only applies when multiple chaos tokens are “resolved.” If multiple chaos tokens are revealed and all but 1 of them are canceled or ignored, this entry does not apply. - FAQ, v.1.4, September 2018

  • Q: I have Ritual Candles in play and take a test. Step 3 occurs, where I pull a symbol. I trigger Candles as a . Step 4 occurs, and the effect is to reveal another token. I return to step 3, where I pull a . Can I trigger Ritual Candles again? (I know you can't when you reveal multiple tokens simultaneously (say through Olive McBride) but I'm less certain here.) A: You sure can! Actually, you can even when revealing multiple tokens with Olive as well, as long as they aren’t being ignored/canceled. For example, if with Olive you revealed a , a and an , and then ignored the , you could still trigger Ritual Candles twice—once for the , and once for the .

  • Q: [part 2, following on from previous Q&A] I thought you can't with Olive because of this rule on triggered abilities: "Each triggered ability may be triggered only once each time the specified condition on the ability is met. For example, an ability that is triggered "After X occurs," may be used once each time "X" occurs. Additionally the FAQ entry Resolving Multiple Revealed Chaos Tokens: "[...] when resolving multiple chaos tokens, any game or card effects which trigger if a certain chaos token is revealed—such as the text “If the named chaos token is revealed during this skill test…” on Recall the Future—will trigger if any of the resolved chaos tokens meet the specified conditions. Such an effect will not trigger twice if two of the designated tokens are resolved." A: [part 2] Each ability can be triggered once each time the specified condition is met. In this case the condition is “after a (symbol) token is revealed during a skill test.” Therefore, if two symbols are revealed during a skill test, the reaction may be triggered twice. (This would be different if it read “1 or more tokens.”) As for the second ruling [the FAQ], that doesn’t apply here. That ruling is specifically talking about effects within another ability that trigger if a chaos token is revealed, such as the horror-dealing effect on Shrivelling. Those are not independent reaction triggers, they are delayed effects that trigger if a particular type of chaos token is revealed (in other words, they are a binary state; they either trigger or they don’t).

Last updated

Reviews

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:


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 ).

foobar · 74
thanks for the write up @foobar. Could you let me know which one has the higher chance? Olive and then her last token Grotesque or the other way around? Which is the right way to play that combo? — chirubime · 25290
I like your analysis and trust your programming and fiddled with the contents of the token bag a little to test other scenarios. I'm pretty sure your first analysis only applies to the forgotten age hard difficulty bag. For a couple others I tested, the result for Olive was worse, basically any chaos bag without a +1 token means Olive is a trap. Also: I think you're wrong about the interaction of Ritual Candles. The text on them says "revealed", it doesn't care about whether or not the tokens get chosen to be resolved. I don't suspect it makes a difference except on standard or higher difficulty. — Mataza · 18
On second look over, I can't say for sure how ritual candles work. I guess only the resolved tokens are actually "revealed" after all. — Mataza · 18
If you have two ritual candles in play it’s +2 when you reveal and resolve a naughty symbol chaos token. Two symbol tokens doesn’t make this + 4 it’s still +2 (just to be clear). — Snakesfighting · 94
Very interesting. I wanted to see how Jacqueline Fine's new investigator ability added to the mix, so I expanded your code snippet to handle a number of possibilities involving her ability as well. No guarantees I did it all right, but it appears to be working [here](https://jsfiddle.net/3koxnzdv/18/show) if anyone is interested. — tylorlilley · 3
@chirubime Better late than never. According to Foobar's graph, drawing by Grotesque statue FIRST then using Olive on the SECOND one increases the chances by almost 10% (Chaos bag = 14 tokens: 2skulls 1elderthing; down to -6) . Logically, on the Statue, you'd take the solo token rather than 2 "minus" token most of the time. The "autosuccess" or autofail have as much chance of showing in both case, but the odds are in your favor having one token instead of two. Note that this is especially true on lower difficulty tests. — LeFricC'estChic · 86
Re-reading this write-up was inspirational, specifically the bit pointing out that Olive gives you roughly a 1-in-5 chance of pulling the Elder Sign. This makes me wonder if it would be worthwhile to Versatile an Olive into a Silas Marsh deck, the investigator whom I feel has far and away the most powerful Elder Sign effect in the game. While he's pretty lacking in any other methods of chaos-bag sealing etc., getting an additional Elder Sign every 5 rounds seems like it may have teeth, and the extra cards from Versatile aren't as troubling in a Survivor deck if you run Short Supply. — HanoverFist · 657

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.

Zerogrim · 284
Hard to setup, tho. $5 and you still gotta fill the bag. — MrGoldbee · 1388
That’s what right of sanctification is for! I tried this build in war of the outer gods and it worked pretty well. That being said I think it’s pretty setup-dependent and I got quite lucky with my mulligan — Difrakt · 1267
5 dollars seems like a lot, but it's a weapon and an ally. 2 is pretty cheap for an ally and 3 is about average for a weapon. I'd say it's on the cheap side really — NarkasisBroon · 10
You’re paying 5r for a weapon that (still inconsistently!) deals +1 damage once a turn, and much less consistently can shoot for +1 other times. It’s definitely not a good deal if your goal isn’t bless-focused. — Difrakt · 1267
0xp, 5 resources, infinite blessing generation and once per turn massive boost to tests, seems pretty cheap to me, I dunno maybe I'm just crazy. — Zerogrim · 284
I'll see this and raise: Olive McBride + .35 Winchester. If 2 damage is good, 3 damage is better. I'm currently running this with my Charlie Kane deck, and it's working. https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/40432/chuck-kane-reverened-warlord-of-the-apocalypse-1.6 — MrWeasely · 41

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.

Tsuruki23 · 2469
Ritual Candles also help with the math as well. I think if you go all in with bag/token manipulation it can do well. — Bronze · 180
Another thing worth noting is that she works incredibly well specifically with Seal effects in Mateo. Who cares what the negative modifiers are as long as you draw one Elder Sign? The more you seal, the better your chances are of getting the Elder Sign as one of your three pulls. Generally as Mateo, Olive helps you the most at tests you're either well under or well over in succeeding (in the former case, you can get an Elder Sign and beat it anyway, in the latter case you protect against the Autofail). Tests that are reasonable (e.g. +2 on Standard) are bad for using Olive. — StyxTBeuford · 12917
Probably worth mentioning that Olive combos pretty well with Wither and Sixth Sense, at least higher level versions that give you a willpower boost — Zinjanthropus · 223

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.

MrGoldbee · 1388
I agree that this is a good combo, but how do you get 10 bucks? Voice of Ra gives 1+2/spooky and draws 3 tokens. With Fine and McBride, you can either draw 5 tokens (one of which you replace with a draw 3 pick 2 before knowing what it is) and then overall cancel 2 of them (or just the auto-fail, but that's not going to happen unless literally all 6 tokens are spooky). Alternately, you can use Olive's ability first and draw 3 (one of which is replaced by a Fine-modified draw 5 pick 2). But the point is, either way you have a realistic maximum of 4 tokens drawn for a maximum of 9 resources. You could only reach 11 resources if you revealed 6 spookies across 7 draws and canceled just an auto-fail which is incredibly unlikely. If there are 17 tokens in the bag, 6 of which are spooky, you are looking at an average of a little under 6 resources on from Voice of Ra. Again, not a bad combo - I actually rather like it - but not quite as powerful as you describe. — Death by Chocolate · 1364
These investigator decks need to get released so I know what the hell voice of ra is. From context I gather it's a zero-cost Mystic event that says, "Reveal three chaos tokens. Gain 1 resource, plus two resources for each [spooky] token revealed." Something like that? Maybe a negative rider for the auto-fail? — SGPrometheus · 745
@SGPrometheus It is exactly what you say. Plus it has the Spell trait, so synergy there with some stuff. And it can pitch for 1 Will. — Death by Chocolate · 1364

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.

SGPrometheus · 745
How do this work with elder sign auto succes : i reveal an auto success and a fail token : what's hapening ? — JemJaime · 8
@JemJaime: Anytime you would both Automatically succeed and Automatically fail, the fail takes precedence. So don't pick the elder sign and the tentacle. Just don't pick the Tentacle at all (exception: if you going to fail anyways, the amount you fail by doesn't matter, and picking one of the other tokens will add doom or something, then take the tentacle) — CecilAlucardX · 10
@CecilAlucardX : thanks a lot — JemJaime · 8
She’s not quite as good as Bulletproof Vest and Elder Sgn Amulet at tanking because the third damage/horror will kill her. — jmmeye3 · 611
@jmmeye3 She can still soak a total of 4 though; the rules/faq clarify that you can assign as much damage/horror to an asset as it has health/sanity remaining, so the only real trick is taking horror and damage at the same time. — SGPrometheus · 745

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?

PureFlight · 743
She gets much, much worse on Hard/Expert, too. — CaiusDrewart · 3004
In short she makes you immune to autofail but potentially doubles the difficulty of all tests. So at standard she turns -2 to -4 — Django · 4859
Yeah, I think the big thing is that you only use her to get (or avoid) specific tokens. Hypnotic Gaze, Astral Travel, Recharge, and Song of the Dead come to mind. Or you can mitigate a test by stacking her with Defiance. In short, she is strictly a combo piece. — PureFlight · 743
Suppose you're playing Mateo and you've already used his trigger to convert and Tentacle to an Elder Sign. Now consider this situation: you pull an Elder Sign, Elder Thing, and the Tentacle? We toss out the Tentacle of course, but what happens if the Elder Thing is also an auto fail? — FractalMind · 36
If she is used within a bag manipulation investigators deck, then you are likely hedging your odds of avoiding multiple bad tokens you don't want to see. It could take quite a bit of work before she would become very useful, but she works with a different archetype of a deck and that's fun. — Bronze · 180

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!

s5una · 2
Anyone know how does Olive interacts with the dynamic of blessed/cursed tokens? She reveals just 3 tokens anyway or (if it's the case) she has to draw more and at the end just choose 2 of them? — tom · 14

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.

Phoenixbadger · 194
This is not quite true. You can still choose the double-olive-token (the skull and -5 in this case). This is because of the following passage in the FAQ: "when resolving multiple chaos tokens, any game or card effects which trigger if a certain chaos token is revealed—such as the text 'If the named chaos token is revealed during this skill test…' on Recall the Future ( 158)—will trigger if any of the resolved chaos tokens meet the specified conditions." So if any token in the double-Olive-token are skulls, cultists, elder things, tablets, or autofails, the double-Olive-token meets the criteria for Dark Prophecy. — iceysnowman · 163