Ghaston Grey:

Challenges: Return a Martell N character you own and control to your hand to choose an opponent's character. Return that character to its owner's hand

Can I discard the duplicate of my N Character to save my character back to my hand and then choose opponent's character to it's owner's hand? Can my opponent's character saved by the duplicate too?

Tiny White 2 said:

Returning that character to your hand is a cost. Remember that when you save someone from something, that something never actually happened. So if you saved the character you return to hand from the cost (something that, btw, we're not entirely sure the timing structure allows you to do, anyway, but that's not important here), you technically never returned the character to hand. If you never returned the character to hand, you didn't actually pay the cost. If you didn't pay the cost, you don't get the effect.

The character returned to hand as an effect, though, could be saved without problems. So your opponent is in the clear.

ktom said:

So if the cost was to kill a character you control, you wouldn't be able to save that character?

Bomb said:

Paying the cost is part of initiating the action in step 1. There's no opportunity to save a card; and, as ktom points out, it doesn't make sense anyhow, because if you don't kill the character, you don't initiate the action.

Bomb said:

#1: Same as the GG explanation above. If you save the character you killed for a cost, the kill never happened. If the kill never happens, you did not pay the cost. If you did not pay the cost, you do not get the effect. So if you save the character you kill for cost, you undo your own initiation.

#2: If you're really paying attention, you'll note that the explanation in #1 is a paradox. In order to kill the character for cost, you have to initiate the effect. But if you save it, so that the character was never killed and you never actually payed the cost, you never actually initiated the effect, either. Not successfully anyway. But if you didn't initiate the effect, then the character was never in danger of being killed, which would make using the save illegal. Said another way, save effects are supposed to interrupt the initiation and the resolution of an effect. Or, from the flow charts, Step 1 (initiate), Step 2 (save), Step 3 (resolve). When you kill for cost, the character dies in Step 1, not Step 3, so you can't interrupt the paying of a cost with a kill (any more than you could interrupt kneeling a location for influence). If you cannot interrupt, you cannot technically save. So, from a timing standpoint, there is a very real argument that, mechanically speaking, killing for cost defies the timing required of saves.

Of course, rather than trying to explain that a whole bunch of times, FFG has gotten in the habit of just saying "cannot be saved" when something is killed or discarded for cost so this explanation doesn't need to be touted out very often. They don't always do it, though.

ktom said:

Yeah, and puting this once into FAQ is not an option.

Thank you both for your replies.

wow.... I never konw there is a timing porblem in this effect.... thank you!

Rogue30 said:

I agree with this sarcasm because it is not clear based on the FAQ.

I also agree that saving a character from being paid for as a cost to an effect is counterproductive because the character needs to be killed to pay for the effect. That doesn't mean I don't think it shouldn't be allowed.

Regardless you'd be silly to cancel your own event by saving your character that is meant to be killed/discarded/etc to pay for the effect..

Bomb said:

While I agree that there's a bunch of things that could do with more explanation in the FAQ, I feel like this is not one of them. To me, this issue is covered well enough by the timing structure as it is detailed in the FAQ and doesn't really need additional clarification. Just my humble opinion, though.

And as for allowing it, I think you really shouldn't, because otherwise it leads to the paradoxical situation described by ktom above. But yeah, moot point because the timing structure inherently makes it impossible to save a card when it's used to pay for an effect.