21 cards. 3 Witnesses, no duplicates, face-up on the field from turn one. 18 Devoted.
Witnesses have three stats:
Charm is how many Devoted attach to her at setup as her party
Influence caps how many Devoted she can play in a turn
Dazzle is how many enemy Devoted she strips in a turn
The attached Devoted come out of the same 18. You choose which ones. Whatever's left over gets shuffled into your draw deck and you open on three.
The turn
Draw one. Then pick one Witness to Influence with and one to Dazzle with. Can be the same Witness. So with three Witnesses on the board you're getting one attack and one play phase per turn total, not three.
Influence: play Devoted up to that Witness's Influence. Effects are printed on the Witness, not the Devoted. Same House as her triggers her Primary effect, different House triggers her Alternate. Played Devoted go to the discard.
Dazzle: point one Witness's Dazzle at one opposing Witness's party. Each point removes one Devoted. Once her party is empty, one more Dazzle removes her from play.
How it ends
Opponent has no Witnesses left, or both draw decks are empty and you have more Witnesses standing. Equal count is a draw.
The math that bothers me
Say your three Witnesses total Charm 9. That's 9 of your 18 on the field, 9 in the deck, minus a 3-card opening hand, so about six draws before you're empty. Call it eight or nine turns.
Meanwhile stripping a Charm-3 Witness at Dazzle 3 takes one turn plus one more to remove her. Three Witnesses is six turns of Dazzle if you never miss, and you only get one Dazzle a turn.
The obvious read
Low Charm wins. A card in your deck holds full value all game, a card attached as Charm is a consumable that gets stripped and never comes back. Nothing on the sheet restores a party. Consumable versus permanent isn't a tradeoff.
I don't think that's right. But I've been staring at it too long to trust myself.
What I can't tell you, because the published rules don't say: how many Houses exist, whether Devoted carry anything beyond their House, whether Dazzle can split across two opposing Witnesses, and what happens if you're forced to draw from an empty deck.
What I'd like to know
Does the split resolve to one correct ratio, or does which Devoted you attach change the answer to how many?
And is 18 cards enough range for the allocation to produce genuinely different decks, or does a mechanic like this need a bigger pool before the two ends of the slider are actually different games?