Suspicious Interaction

So I was playing against a Mage and they were playing Suspicious Alchemist + Smothering Starfish. Interestingly, I did not get the choice of picking a card, although Suspicious Alchemist's effect is supposedly a battlecry entirely.

Do you have any idea why Starfish should nullify the effect of Alchemist? Is it some kind of aura? Usually Battlecries should not be silenced when they affect cards or game interactions that are not board-based...

The answer to your question is this. Blademaster Okani

Same Battlecry, same thing happen if this card was silenced before it can do it's part when the timing come.

There's nothing wrong with it. Just keep it as a lesson, because that's Hearthstone, an old card games where they can't explain the complete effect of cards because limited by about 15 words.

Those suspicious minions have a little sparkle emblem beneath them (same as spellburst's I think) that goes away after the opponent makes their guess, so the devs must have coded it as an effect attached to the minion that is checked for at the start of the turn. Since silencing minions removes everything except their (base) stats, it fits that this is removed too.

Whether this should happen from a design (rather than mechanical) point of view is another question entirely. I suspect this was just their way of coding a battlecry that didn't all resolve straight away, and they didn't think silence edge cases were important enough to work around.

That's definitely the first time I hear of such a strange interaction, although the explanations above make some sense (in the weird "Hearthstone coding" sort of way). Still, could be worth checking with devs whether it's actually intended. Unless one of them has already covered this scenario back when these cards were being released, and I missed it.