thanks guys. The mix material is more what i'm after.
Using the mix material, can I overlay a material of clear varnish (masked if needed) on top of the base material? basically a material that is clear, with no texture, in the same way that a varnish would work in real life (example: matte paper as a base, with a clear layer of varnish applied on top of the paper)? If so, how would I go about doing that? That would keep things a lot cleaner in terms of material creation to do it like that instead of duplicating the entire material, with all its textures, just to create a gloss effect on a couple lines of text.
also, it looks like i'm stuck with only 2 materials being able to be combined as far as I can tell? That's a bit of a hurdle for me, I have to say.

sometimes I might have 2 or 3 different colored foils of different roughness or color on a label along with 2 or 3 different levels of varnish roughness. In Maxwell Render I could layer as I needed, which made these complicated label materials much easier to do.
Intel i7-3930K, 64gb RAM, Asus X79 Deluxe mobo, 2x EVGA 780 6gb (for rendering), 1x PNY quaddro k4000 (for display)
Windows 8.1 x64, Maya 2014, Octane Render v2