The Platinum Yendorian Express Card
| ( The Platinum Yendorian Express Card (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| 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 neutral for wishing purposes. Its base item type is a credit card.
When carried, the Card confers magic resistance, telepathy and half spell damage. Invoking the Card charges objects just like the scroll of charging. However, only tourists can perform blessed charging.[1]
This artifact is a reference to 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 PYEC is the only quest artifact whose name is not of the form “The X of [the] Y.”
Charging
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 again too soon (You feel the Platinum Yendorian Express Card is ignoring you) is only a delay of 3d10 turns. See Invoke#Optimum_invocation_schedule for the optimum strategy; in short, you should wait 91 turns after a successful invoke, 121 turns after one consecutive failure, 211 turns after two consecutive failures etc.
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 (or a Magic marker with more than 20 charges and if you want a chance to boost it to 75 charges[2]) - for either of those, use a blessed Scroll of charging. It can still be extremely helpful for charging things a player might otherwise normally not waste a scroll of charging on: throwaway wands, magical tools, and certain stat-boosting rings.
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.
