Wernog, Rider's Chaplain

A political trap dressed as a chaplain's blessing. Every trigger hands each opponent a choice with no clean answer: pay a Clue's worth of attention to investigate, or bleed for it, and either way you come out ahead. Investigate, and you feed the tax that scales your own payoff; decline, and you take the damage while the chaplain still investigates for himself. The counting is the whole trick: X is one plus however many opponents played along, so a full table that all investigate leaves you with a pile of Clues at the cost of nothing but their compliance. It is a symmetrical-looking effect that is quietly one-sided, since you always get more than any single opponent and never take the punishment yourself. Friends forever, the partner variant printed on the body, carries no color-identity gate and no restriction beyond the keyword itself, so this fragile 1/2 slots into any two-headed command zone alongside another Friends forever creature and becomes half a two-commander engine. The flicker interaction is designed in rather than incidental: because the ability fires on both entering and leaving, blink and bounce effects double the Clue harvest, turning the body's frailty into an asset. Small, cheap, and best run as a recurring toll booth rather than a creature to defend.