Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
Secretkeeper should say "whenever a secret comes into play".
To make the card viable (or at least more viable) it should trigger from any secret coming into play - including the from a mad scientist death rattle.
Ben Brode
I did - the problem is how you change the words on the card to make that happen. I was just saying it's quite difficult to solve the problem of making Secretkeeper trigger off of Mad Scientist, while keeping Secretkeeper readable.
Ben Brode
We don't ever say "comes into play" on cards; We say "enters the battlefield". We use the word "play" to mean "taking a card from your hand and dragging it into the battlefield", so we don't want to confuse that term by using it in more than one place.
Here are some other templates we brainstormed once upon a time: Whenever you Secret up, Whenever your number of Secrets increases, Whenever you play or summon a Secret, Whenever you hide a Secret, Whenever you power a Secret, Whenever you attach a Secret to your hero,
None of them really reads like English to us, and they felt like they made the card more difficult to parse while reading it for the first time.
We're fairly aggressive about having "instantly understandable" cards, it's an important design goal that helps spread the joy of Hearthstone to audiences that are normally put off by the complexity of card games!