Officious Interrogation

Most political instants that scale with the table hand out one effect per opponent and call it symmetric generosity; this one inverts the math. The base two mana buys a single target and the Clues from just that player's board, but every additional player you rope in taxes you more, so pricing out the table becomes the first decision you make before the spell ever resolves. That escalation is what keeps a spell that can, in theory, manufacture a fistful of Clues from being a free windfall: the more creatures you want to count, the more players you must target, and each addition is a real mana commitment at instant speed. The reward for paying up is an artifact-token engine that draws off boards you do not control, a genuinely different resource axis than the "sacrifice your own creatures for value" line most token generators walk. Investigating off other players' full boards turns crowded, stalled positions into a payday, and because you target players rather than their creatures, you choose exactly which boards to fold into the count: skip the empty-handed opponent, load up on the two players sitting behind walls of tokens. That targeting discipline makes it play more like a spell you build a turn around than one you fire off reflexively. It is multiplayer-native in a way few instants are: the incentive is not to hit everyone, but to find the right cluster of full boards.