Yep, if I am messing around with Mint Mate, I usually get hold of the Ubuntu Mate themes and apply the Ambient Mate Theme. I have yet to find any thing that beats Ambiant Mate with Dark Faenza Icons and Compton running in the background with menu, panel and window decoration transparencies.
One other thing that always niggles me about Mint is that it does not include the Indicator applets as standard. After some significant messing about, it is possible to get them running on Standard Mint Mate (in particular, indicator-sound, but I also use quite a few other less well known ones). But is impossible on LMDE2 Mate. But, that is probably a Debian issue.
The thing is, though - by the time I have finished tweaking Mint Mate to how I like it, I have more or less re-created Ubuntu Mate. Which kind of defeats the point!