Arma virumque said:

Yeah that's true. I guess that would make it a lot less of a surprise. Ok, modified prediction: when you play the shadow cards face down you don't have to pay for them, you only pay for them when they are revealed. This would complement the cards in the core set that shuffle gold around in the challenges phase.

perthius said:

What about out-of-House penalties? Or reducing (assuming "Any Phase" reducers, of course; there aren't really any cards that currently reduce cost outside of Marshaling)?

OOH penalties would still apply. I doubt the reducing part would come into it but if a challenge phase reducer card was printed I don't see why it would be restricted from working for this payment.

I see it as working the same as a marshalling action. When the card is played it would be a card coming into play (not a character) and when the character is revealed it would just be a card changing from no type to a character.

Just thinking out loud here:

What if the Shadow Crest cards were played face down during any phase and any amount of gold could be placed on them. You could place more gold on them any phase you want, even in future rounds. When revealed(maybe Challenge phase only so any individual Marshaling phase can't be abused) pay the amount of gold for the cost and then the remaining gold if any goes to your gold pool(could combo with the Plot: Planning Ahead). While face down they are immune to all card effects. Some of them will probably have a "When Revealed" ability.

perthius said:

You know, I don't see any problem with it being "less of a surprise." That's just one of the advantages of being an experienced player. And there's a big difference between being able to predict, for example, "That's probably a 2-strength tricon or a 3-strength bicon," compared to being able to predict the specific card with its text, keywords, etc. For the latter, you would have to be a very experienced player playing against a well-established deck archetype.

So for all those reasons, I prefer the original design idea over the "pay when revealed" idea. I fear that the ability to play a card face-down now and pay for it later would be used as a cheap way of protecting your cards from intrigue challenges.

perthius said:

The whole concept of cost modifiers is very interesting in this context. Going back to the original idea (since I just spoke out in favor of it anyway), I assumed that a card could stay upside-down until needed (i.e., longer than 1 turn). This would make it difficult to audit the amount of gold "paid" by placing it on the card, since you would have to keep track of cost modifiers (either triggered or passive) from turn to turn. So I would propose an addendum that cost modifiers simply don't apply to upside-down cards (except OOH). Yes, this could be used as a sneaky way to bypass cost modifiers that increase costs -- but after all, what are Shadows cards if not sneaky?

Of course, now that I think about it, both the "pay when revealed" idea and the cost reducers become significantly less problematic if you say that characters cannot stay upside-down beyond the end of the challenges phase. Perhaps that's what you intended all along. In that case, though, we would need a penalty specified in case a person didn't have enough gold at the end of the challenges phase to pay for his upside-down cards.