That meant the first set, Shadows over Innistrad, would be all about investigating strange occurrences [...]
We really wanted a mechanic named investigate to
capture a sense of investigation. What exactly would investigate do? Drawing cards seemed like the cleanest answer. When you investigate, you learn things. The problem was that it resulted in too much card draw. So, we asked ourselves if there was a way to draw half a card? It turns out there was. We could create an artifact token, a Clue, that let you pay

and sacrifice it to draw a card. Investigate got you halfway to drawing a card, which allowed us to put a lot more of the mechanic into the set.
Clue tokens proved to be a major step forward for Magic design. Players could use them to draw cards, but now we had this object that we could design elements of the set around. Its mere existence meant we could make cards that cared about that permanent being on the battlefield. It was specifically an artifact, so it could be part of an "artifacts matter" theme. You could sacrifice it for other effects. It was both
super flavorful and useful from a structural standpoint. It was the beginning of a new vein of token design, where a singular noncreature token could be a key component of a set's structure.