Stromgald Spy
Trade your combat step for an open book: swing in unblocked and you can keep the defending player's hand revealed for as long as the Spy stays on the battlefield, but you assign no damage that turn for the privilege. That last condition is what keeps the deal honest. Perfect information is worth a great deal, so the card asks you to surrender the very attack that earned the peek. The bind goes deeper than the tax, though. With a 2/4 body and no evasion, cashing in the trigger means engineering a board where a midsized creature with no way through can still connect, which is exactly the situation where you would rather it stayed back to block. It reads as a control tool wearing an attacker's costume, a contradiction that feels very much of its design era, before "card advantage" and "information advantage" had been cleanly separated in the vocabulary. The reveal is also fragile: it lives and dies with the creature, so a single removal spell hides the hand again. This sits in a thin lineage of permanents that expose an opponent's hand on an ongoing basis rather than as a one-shot glance, an effect that mostly found its home in black and blue control shells. What you get, in the end, is a creature that wants to swing into open air and then politely decline to hurt anyone.
