When you play a shield from your hand do you have to pay the card cost?

Using a card as a shield does not cost anything.

The only "cost" for a shield is to discard the card in question, then you may prevent X assigned damage (where X is the number of shield icons.)

... up to X damage.

Remember you may only use one shield card per instance of damage.

So if your warlord would take 5 damage from an attack, you cannot discard a 3-shield card and a 2-shield card to reduce the damage to 0. (you could reduce it to 2 by discarding the 3-shield card.)

... up to X damage.

Just wondering...is there some confusion about this?

He said "prevent X damage". I was just throwing in a reminder that it's "prevent up to X damage", eg a 2-shield card can be used to prevent 1 damage if desired.

Got it..thanks.