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.

This card is very powerful, when added to the combo of Will to Survive, True Survivor and 2x Resourceful.

What the combo does: Play Will to Survive and commit 2x Resourceful on any test to recover True Survivor and Will to Survive. Next turn play True Survivor to recover 2x Resourceful and any other skill.

You can repeat this as often as you want until you run out of ressources, which happens pretty fast at a total cost of 7 (4 + 3). Enter On Your Own: It reduces the total cost to 3!

I've only seen one deck (my own) that could pull of the old combo, but with reduced costs nearly every survivor should be able to pull it off. Maybe not Wendy because her Abandoned and Alone weakness destroys many survivor discard pile recurring.

You can use any version of Emergency Cache and Take Heart to gain more ressources. I think testless actions are very strong as you potentially avoid many bad icons that might hurt you or add doom, so even taking the "gain 1 ressource" action can be a good idea to keep the combo going.

Let's get one thing out the way first--this card is just terrible compared to Key of Ys. Granted. But most cards in the game are going to be terrible compared to Key of Ys, so let's not make that a serious factor in our evaluation of this card. +1 to all stats is an extremely powerful effect, even if Key of Ys might make it seem paltry in comparison.

Still, for a lot of Mystics builds, you don't really care about all of your stats. Plenty of Mystics never use Combat and rarely use Agility. You might not even care about anything except Willpower, to be honest. Which means this card is just much, much worse than Holy Rosary or St. Hubert's Key.

If this card has a niche, it's surely in solo play. There a Mystic is most likely to need all stats, and the card's drawback of sealing the Elder Sign is the least painful.

But in multiplayer, I just see very little reason to play this card instead of those other Amulet options. Even if this card were 0 XP, I would still prefer the Rosary and/or St. Hubert's Key. Since it's 3 XP, it's not remotely attractive.

Finally, there's the social element to be considered here. If you're playing multiplayer, you're taking away quite a bit of fun from other players when you seal the Elder Sign token. Not only will your teammates perform a little worse, they will also lose some of the most exciting and dramatic moments in the game.

I've played as Norman Withers through a few scenarios and this card has come up several times. I have never played this card (although I've been occasionally tempted to play it at a discount off the top of his deck). However, I really like the icons on it. Norman will ideally be doing a lot tests that take advantage of his high and , so being able to augment a critical check with this card is pretty nice. I would say that is probably the best use for this card.

If this had to be played for some reason, I don't know if it's worth it to use the icon unless the lead investigator is close to defeat and needs to avoid damage or horror in order to stay in the game. Interestingly, the effect can be used to remove the top card of your deck if you have a skill card there and you want to try to get a better asset card to play with Norman's top-of-the-deck discount. However, I don't think this is very efficient - if you're using cards that you're ok with going straight to the discard pile, maybe it's worth considering swapping them out of your deck entirely? Also, drawing a card using the draw action has the same effect - it does cost an action, but you also get a card out if it that way. Some weird scenarios do want you to mill the encounter deck, but even then this is not a very efficient way to do so.

In short - it's an interesting card, but I'd normally only ever use it for the icons. The icons are quite useful.

Carolyn Fern can take this; she can use the level 1 version because she's her, and this because it heals horror. She can also take Shrewd Analysis, which has a strange interaction here: Since this is the only "eligible" option, she flat out upgrades the second copy for free. The other version isn't eligible because she can't include it in her deck, so it's not included among the random options. Since shrewd analysis is so easy to include in a deck, it's now a viable include for Carolyn. The biggest hurdle is getting the initial investigate off to upgrade the card at all, but she can be built as a solid seeker so that's not such an issue.