Strength: 4
Type: Spy Power
Effect Text: Play in your opponent's Melee row, then draw two cards. At the end of the round, this unit returns to the player's hand whose side of the field it is on.
Flavor Text: "He was a heretic, I swear it!"
Artwork: The Defenestration by Václav Brožík (1890)
Strategy:
Spies are a powerful way to stall and obtain card draw, effectively giving you more turns than your opponent; however, your opponent will pick up the spy at the end of the round to use against you. To minimize your opponent’s opportunity for card draw, try to use other power cards to pick up the spy directly from the playing field, send the spy to the graveyard, swap the spy back to your side of the field (so it returns to your hand at the end of the round), or play your spy in the final round of the game. Unlike most spies, the Zealot card doesn’t come with the risk of creating adjacency for your opponent.
About the card:
This card depicts the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, in which three Catholic nobles were thrown out of a window at Prague Castle after a dispute over the right to build Protestant churches. All three survived the fall, but as the situation devolved into open revolt, the Emperor and the Bohemians prepared for war (see also Winter King).
The circumstances were eerily similar to the 1419 Defenestration in which a mob of Hussites (a Bohemian religious movement which predated the Protestant Reformation but shared in many of its beliefs) threw Catholic local officials out of a window in the town hall. This previous defenestration led to the Hussite wars with the Emperor.
