Telepathic Spies

The information is real, but the body it rides on tells you exactly how much the information was worth. A peek at the opponent's hand was a meaningful effect in this card's era, when knowing whether to play around a counterspell or a removal spell could be worth a card; the trouble is that the look happens once, on entry, and then the trigger has spent itself. This is the design tension that dogs every "enters, then does a thing" creature: the value is stapled to a permanent that has to keep justifying its presence after the trigger resolves, and a 2/2 with no further text does not. Put the same look on an instant or a sorcery and the spend is one-for-one, the card leaving cleanly; pinning it to a body means paying a creature's worth of mana and a card slot for a single reveal you cannot rebuy. What the design teaches well is the difference between a snapshot and an ongoing read: this hands you one frozen image of the opponent's hand, while a recurring source of information rewrites how you sequence every subsequent turn. It offers honest value as it resolves and a vanilla beater forever after, which is precisely why decks that wanted to see and attack the opponent's hand learned to put their information and their discard on cheaper, leaner shells rather than a fragile Wizard that reads the cards but never touches them.