Father Mateo Brings Peace Beyond Understanding

The motivation behind this deck came from a couple recent campaigns where other party members were especially brutalized by the auto-fail token. I've also been wanting to test out the new Olive McBride, which is incomparably better than the 0xp Olive McBride. The inspiration for the list came from a Playing Board Games video a while back (if you're reading this, thanks for your great content and this fun idea!), with the thought was that Father Mateo is uniquely well positioned as an investigator to maximize the 2xp version in being able to benefit from the additional Elder Sign pulls. Auto-succeed + extra action is a heck of a drug.

I really wanted to play the deck when I recalled that Fr Mateo starts with an additional 5xp, which conveniently means that he rolls out in scenario 1 with the upgraded Olive. I always feel that scenario 1 performance is disproportionately meaningful to how an investigator feels throughout a campaign, since it can set you on a virtuous higher-xp spiral if it goes well. And as a side bonus, if the deck turns out to have legs, rocking the Padre in a campaign means that players who tend to go all-in on big skill card commitments have a security blanket for when the red tentacles come crawling out of the bag.

There are a couple different conceivable approaches to building a Fr Mateo along these lines, but I kept things fairly simple. Basically, to taste the spicy 2xp Olives, I kept everything else as bland as possible. Rather than lean into tons of token-fishing and token-sealing, I kept Olive as the main enabler (plus Fr Mateo's signature asset, of course). The spell load-out leaned toward clue-finding with a light flex, since the opposite character was Silas Marsh spec'd as a fighter. As with most generic mystics, it would be straightforward to run this as a more fight-y build by shifting toward the usual attack spells.

Going into a Dunwich run, I had two big questions:

1. How much of a difference does the upgraded Olive McBride make?

2. How does this build compare to doing the exact same thing, except with Jacqueline Fine (my all-time favorite investigator in multiple Arkham Files games) at the helm? I broke this down into two sub-questions:

   2a. How does the power ceiling/floor feel compared to Jacqueline? My theory is that both will be higher on the good Padre, given his fantastic Elder Sign ability and his ability to convert an auto-fail into an Elder Sign post-pull.

   2b. Do the higher ceiling and floor for Fr Mateo outweigh the lower consistency? This is the big question, given that Jacqueline basically has another Olive McBride stapled to her character card.

Most of the specific spell choices were made with an eye toward leveraging the greater control (and sometimes multiple symbol hits) that come out of the chaos bag. Since Padre Mateo was the main clue-finder, I prioritized Read the Signs and Sixth Sense.

One switch I made (that was very obvious in retrospect) was to add Voice of Ra, which has solid synergy with our all-star Olive McBride.

Link to the full xp deck

Read the Signs was pure amaze-balls in this deck. Being able to loop the upgraded version back to hand was excellent, and the additional recursion from Prescient doubled down on it. Fr Mateo more than held up his end of the bargain as the clue-finder for the campaign.

Mists of R'lyeh was surprisingly consequential. As the main clue-finder, being able to regularly combine evade+move was helpful. It was good enough that it sometimes represented a compelling choice for when to use the Olive McBride activation, even over clue-finding effects, just to guarantee the move.

The upgraded Eldritch Inspiration is subtle but clutch. Being able to grab two extra actions off an Elder Sign enabled some borderline-degenerate turns. The upgraded Sign Magick doubled down on the action efficiency with some regularity.

There were two kinds of scenarios with this deck: ones where I had Olive McBride in my opening hand, and ones where I didn't. The games where she was present from the start felt amazing, and we generally aced the scenario, even if the team's fighter was struggling a bit. By mid-campaign, I had learned the hard way that the mulligan strategy is simple: throw away anything and everything to make sure you find her. And if you don't, prepare to spend some time digging. The polarity was so pronounced that I was tempted to tweak the deck to run Calling in Favors and a couple extra allies (perhaps Arcane Initiate). A clean tutor would make a massive consistency difference here, but lacking that, I'll probably try a [[Calling in Favors]] build next time.

Similarly, the key piloting decision with this deck is when to use the Olive McBride activation each turn. Generally, you have to determine the critical point to guarantee having or not having symbols, then commit. Late campaign, that often ended up being on Read the Signs, in order to (nearly) guarantee being able to loop it back to hand. Or if there was enemy pressure and the fighter was busy, the choice was usually Mists of R'lyeh or Wither.

The action compression effects of Eldritch Inspiration and the upgraded Sign Magick led to some truly disgusting turns, albeit with some RNG. By the last couple scenarios, the better turns would go something like this: start off with a Mists of R'lyeh activation for evade + move, nab a freebie investigate Sixth Sense off of Sign Magick, follow up with Read the Signs for two clues, and activate Rite of Seeking another three clues. So far, six clues, and if we hit an Elder Sign somewhere in there or didn't have to worry about an evasion, we could easily have another 1-2 clues or a scenario-relevant action. The good Padre works long hours some days, with a peak of sneaking in 8-10 basic-action equivalents on his best rounds.

I drew the god-hand at the start of Where Doom Awaits and had a couple random Elder Sign pulls, and we utterly annihilated the scenario. When this deck fires on all cylinders, it feels incredibly powerful. At first, I would reserve Padrecito's "stop the auto-fail" ability for back-up on the fighter's key tests, but it quickly became clear that, at least sometimes, it was better to use the auto-fail as an extra Elder Sign at critical junctures, instead of just Olive-ing it back inside the bag and keeping the insurance policy.

I was reminded at a few points of how much it hurts a mystic to have only 4 brain. It usually wasn't a massive problem, but investigating on high-shroud locations without one of the buffs or an open Olive activation was dicey. The Cat Mask and the Four of Cups generally looked like a reasonable starting point, but there's a good case to be made for Holy Rosary or even St. Hubert's Key. My main issue with Holy Rosary is that the upgraded version that adds bless tokens is a bit of a non-bo with the core deck concept. Some pre-campaign experimentation with Guided by Faith made me very suspicious of adding tokens to the bag for a token-fishing deck, since it really dilutes your chaos bag control, but there might be a #Blessed version of this concept worth exploring. The approach I'd really like to try would be with Living Ink, but I'm not sure how that would gel with the overall experience-dependence of the deck.

The Event spells were solid. If they ever do a further upgrade to Spectral Razor that brings in some bonus effects on symbols, I'll definitely be pulling this back out for another run. The synergy with Prescient was nice, though I may have simply had skill recursion on the brain, since I was looking over at Silas Marsh.

Now to answer the big questions:

1. How much of a difference does the upgraded Olive McBride make?

Holy moley, it's not even close. Four versus three tokens revealed is a massive difference. She's almost certainly the best single thing you can be doing in Father Mateo--the classic team of priest and bruja, I guess? And when she's out, this deck sings like no other Father Mateo deck I've ever played. When it all went average or better, it felt powerful.

But ... how much of that is Father Mateo, and how much of that is Olive McBride? Cue the kicker questions.

2. How does this build compare to doing the exact same thing, except with Jacqueline Fine at the helm?

   2a. How does the power ceiling/floor feel compared to Jacqueline?

   2b. Do the higher ceiling and floor for Fr Mateo outweigh his lower consistency?

To the first sub-question (2a), it's fairly clear that Fr Mateo's ceiling is higher than Jacqueline's. The ability to straight up gain an extra action based off the Elder Sign is amazing, and you hit it semi-regularly: I generally managed about 2-3 times per scenario.

The statistic of another 2-3 Elder Signs per scenario is the first key metric to answer (2b), since it gives us a way to compare with Jacqueline, who does not have a corresponding 2-3 extra actions from the character card. The second metric is the fact that Jacqueline gets a guaranteed Olive-like effect from her player card every single round. This latter point brought me to the conclusion that Jackie's floor is actually higher than Mateo's, since the floor is not a bad bag pull but rather not having Olive McBride available from turn 1. There are other variables (i.e. how much deck-building space does each have to devote to buffing brain, how much can we leverage Fr Mateo's off-color Blessed splash), but those are incidental to the core question of the deck.

Let's focus on the essential thing: Jacqueline is basically 0xp Olive McBride the character card, who also gets to run a couple extra copies of her best self and always starts with the equivalent of a Four of Cups in play. The massively greater consistency stapled to Jackie's character is going to lead to fewer failed actions, more incidental bonuses from pulling symbols, fewer splash-damage problems from symbols gone wrong, and (above all) no games without some Olive-like effect. My sense after running it through a campaign is that those things are worth more than 2-3 extra actions. Maybe not by a whole lot, and I don't think by enough to say that Fr Mateo is "strictly worse", but by enough where I miss the consistency.

The other, harder-to-quantify piece of this puzzle is the degree to which just having Fr Mateo around provides a noticeable degree of passive team support. Your friends are less hesitant to commit hard to a critical play, if they know the auto-fail isn't a risk (at least the first time). Beyond the social benefit, I find that that fearlessness encourages more confident play out of less experienced or more superstitious players. Jackie brings some of that same energy in a more limited way, but you have to plan for it, and you're potentially sacrificing part of your core deck functionality (if you haven't found Olive). Mateo fixes the vibes just by showing up.

By way of conclusion, even though I've long since come to terms with the fact that I'm an Arkham spike, I regularly play with people who seem to be cursed to pull the auto-fail token, sometimes repeatedly in successive tests. I much prefer Jackie's consistency, and I'm looking forward to putting her through her paces with basically this exact same deck. But realistically, I dislike having to perform real-life arcane rituals to appease the auto-fail mythos deity and to restore my playgroup's faith in the power of statistics. In a world like the one we're living in, sometimes you need a priest, and I think the Mateo/Olive token-fishing archetype will have a place in my toolkit.

When the chaos bag runs rampant, and fear of the auto-fail rules the table, my playgroup can pray that Fr Mateo will show up with his bruja friend to bring peace beyond mathematical understanding.