The Platinum Yendorian Express Card

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(   The Platinum Yendorian Express Card   Credit card.png
Base item credit card
Affiliation
When carried
When applied (none)
When invoked
Base price 7000 zm
Weight 1

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card, or PYEC, is the tourist quest artifact. It is the prize for completing the tourist quest. It is neutral for wishing purposes. Its base item type is a credit card.

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card is the only vanilla quest artifact whose name is not of the form “The X of [the] Y.”

Effects

When carried, the Card confers magic resistance, telepathy and half spell damage. Invoking the Card can charge objects like a scroll of charging, including having different effects based on the Card's beatitude for Tourists; for non-Tourists, the blessed Card only charges like an uncursed scroll.[1] Unlike the scroll, the Card has no special effect if it is invoked while you are confused.

Strategy

Although the number of turns you must wait to invoke the Card again for charging is random, every 200 turns or so is usually a safe but suboptimal number. The penalty for trying to invoke the artifact too soon ("You feel the Platinum Yendorian Express Card is ignoring you") is only a delay of 3d10 (more) turns. See Invoke § Optimum invocation schedule for the optimum strategy; for most purposes, it's enough to invoke it every 80 turns.

Since the Tourist is the only class that can use the card for blessed charging, non-Tourist PYEC charging is a bad idea for a wand of wishing, as well as a magic marker with more than 20 charges or one that you want to try to boost to 75 charges[2])—for either of those, use a blessed scroll of charging. It can still be extremely helpful for charging other things a player might otherwise normally not waste a scroll of charging on - throwaway wands, magical tools, and certain stat-boosting rings.

Origin

The artifact gets its name from the Commodore 64 version of the game Wizardry, whose manual states that players start with limited gold because "few adventurers have a Platinum Yendorian Express Card". The name is based off the American Express suite of credit cards - certain types of credit cards are also known as charge cards, hence the artifact's ability when invoked.

(Somewhat funnily, the tiles representation of credit cards is modeled after a Mastercard, which is a credit card but not a charge card).

Encyclopedia entry

This is an ancient artifact made of an unknown material. It
is rectangular in shape, very thin, and inscribed with
unreadable ancient runes. When carried, it grants the one
who carries it ESP, and reduces all spell induced damage done to
the carrier by half. It also protects from magic missile
attacks. Finally, its power is such that when invoked, it
can charge other objects.

References

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