She probably doesn't work with Eyes of the Dreamer or Breath of the Sleeper to increase their chances, because they need you to choose one chaos token to resolve, while she forces to take the first symbol. Even if you ignore a matching token, there is no "chosen token" to match it with.
Hot damn, arguably one of the best Specialist cards around (Feel free to tell me I am wrong and provide examples of Specialist cards you think are better)
It is inevitable to make a comparison to Haste when looking at this card, as it is basically the inverse of it: the main two differences is that Captivating Performance is slotless and Haste is cheaper experience wise! Take 2 actions of the same type to perform an extra one, vs perform three different actions, to get your extra action! Haste is good when you want to perform the same type of action over and over, like fighting a big enemy, and Captivating Performance is a nice extra action for something that you might otherwise be missing like getting resources, cards, moving or playing out your other cards in hand! Haste is focused and Captivating Performance is flexible.
Originally, as it is written this seemed a bit weaker, because you had to avoid performing actions that overlap in order to be elegible to an action you may or may not be able to perform, and that most of the time was gonna be a Resource, Move or Draw action: given the card's cost in exp and resources, that is alright, but not that great
THANKFULLY, the FaQ did specify hybrid cards only count in the sequence the way you want them to, if you for example use Sixth Sense, you can say you are either Investigating or Activating a card, which turns Captivating Performance from mid to straight up great!
Now, you might say "Even then that doesn't remove the problem that the card locks you into really sub-par turn to use, as you need to make sure doing 3 different actions each round to be elegible to another one, which often is of limited use because 3 different type of actions ALREADY covers a good amount of types you can do (at the time of these writing, action types include Activate, Engage, Evade, Fight, Investigate, Move, Play, Resource, and Draw, another FaQ added Parley. I think jury is still out for Forgotten Age's Explore)" and to that I say, what makes you think I'm only doing 3 actions per turn? The decks you play this card in are gonna use OTHER CARDS THAT GIVE ACTIONS so that you can more easily get use out of this every turn. The stupid way that these two cards interact makes this the perfect partner for a card that I spoke about earlier. HASTE. "WHAT! HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT! THEY HAVE ANTI SYNERGY; HASTE WANTS TO DO SAME ACTION BUT CAPTIVATING PERFORMANCE WANT DIFFERENT ONE" is what you might be thinking, but that's where you are wrong, kiddo. this combo is amazing for evade based fighters and evading cluevers because of activating.
Fighter: I activate "insert name of evading asset", then I use dirty fighting to fight with "insert name of fighting asset". I have now used 2 activate actions, letting me activate again with haste. I use "insert name of fighting asset", which means I've done an evade, a fight and and activate. This let's me use Captivating Performance to play "insert name of fight event". I have now evaded the boss and fought it 3 times, and I still have 2 actions left.
Cluevers are a bit more situational, but evading investigating and activating are quite easy to do with those as well, which means that Captivating Performance is just another action to move, draw, resource or play, making your clue gathering machine even more well oiled since this card works overtime to fill the roles of Dr Milan Christopher (money), Joey "the rat" Vigil (plays your slow assets), Lucky cigarette case (draw) and Pathfinder (move).
The way that you look at this card isn't "difficult condition into 1 extra action but bad", you need to see it as the glue that makes your turn stick together giving you what you need as an extra bonus EVERY TURN. This card isn't a card that carries your deck by doing 1 000 000 damage or scooping up every clue in a 5 mile radius, but it is the card that let's you put all of your other cards into doing that by giving you breathing room through letting you not have to choose between moving or playing your asset, or investigating or grabbing an extra resource.
So why do some people think it sucks? because it does. When you look at only this card. If there are no enemies and you have no cards on field or in hand this card let's you investigate once, then you have to stop investigating to draw a card, grab a resource and move or get no value whatsoever out of this card. But you will have cards. Both in hand and on the board, so now you can play and activate as well. there will also be enemies to evade or parley with. This already makes up 8 different actions, so finding 4 that you wanna do during any given turn is way easier than you might think, especially if you gear your deck towards doing different types of actions like fighting AND evading or investigating AND parleying.
This sounds great and all, but so far it has been nothing other than theoretical stuff... So let's get into the fun part! Which investigators do you take this card with? My personal top 2 would definitely be Lucius Galloway (Clues and evading) and Dexter Drake (Fighting and evading). This is because both of these investigators have access to two roles that they can excel at, and rogues lvl 0-2 extra action bullshit (like HASTE, dirty fighting, blur, eon chart etc.). I'll give Marie Lambeau an honorable mention since she does get 4 actions per turn if you juggle the doom stuff and she can access all kinds of spells to fill up her different actions with, but she doesn't make the list because you need atleast 2 spells with different purposes, charges on those spells and often enemies to use one or two of the spells on as well as some buffs to willpower to be able to get any amount of value out of her Captivating Performance. That being said, maybe some extra resources, moves or card draws are what she needs to be able to glue her deck together, who knows?
While the resource cost is same as Haste, this is a Level 3 card as opposed to Level 2, costing an extra exp to buy but filling in a slightly different niche in the same decks as haste. This card definitely IS worth 3 exp, as it is great at filling in for what your other cards are lacking. You can't use "it is basically a 50% difficulty increase to trigger the effect compared to haste" as an argument seeing as they are NOT COMPETING FOR SLOTS OR DECKSPACE OR NICHE AND INSTEAD JUST WORK WELL TOGETHER IN THE SAME DECK MEANING THAT PITTING THEM AGAINST EACHOTHER AS IF YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE IS CREATING A FALSE DICHOTOMY. The fact that Captivating Performance is slotless makes the only real cost of running this card the experience since it: draws you card to cycle itself, gives you resources to pay for itself gives you actions to play other cards and moves, depending on exactly what you need in the moment.
It's really nice, because I like the concept of Specialist cards, and this is it chief: it's flexible and strong! I tried it in my Lucius deck and I was impressed. Great card, 10/10 in the right decks as the glue that makes you go from "amazing if I get my stuff out" to "amazing when I get my stuff out".
Anyone else utterly lost as to how this card is supposed to work? Why does it have 1 health but text to get +2? Clearly the card can take damage and then heal that damage, but there's no reason for the health to be split between printed and text-based (especially since so few cards blank the text of player assets like this)? Is there some quirk to the rules where printed health is treated as different from text-based? This card just raises more questions than answers.
So I finally played this card in a Lucius Galloway deck in The Dream-Quest campaign, after only theorizing about it before.
All in all, I am happy with my experience and it went as expected. A few things to consider, though:
One downside I noticed, though, was a psychological one, from a player's perspective: If you don't go for cards with experience cost reductions or pack Adaptable, you are playing with. the. same. deck. the. entire. campaign. Even if you like that card as much as I do, that can get boring, because it robs you of a significant part of the AH experience.
Never has a more perfect investigation tool been designed And then printed into
It gets better with more players as more enemies are drawn.
Combos: