The Platinum Yendorian Express Card

(   The Platinum Yendorian Express Card
Base item	credit card
Affiliation	neutral Tourist intelligent
When carried	telepathy magic resistance half spell damage
When applied	(none)
When invoked	charging
Base price	7000 zm
Weight	1

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card (informally PYEC) is the Tourist quest artifact. It is the prize for completing the Tourist quest, and 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 Platinum Yendorian Express Card confers magic resistance, telepathy and half spell damage. Invoking the Card can charge objects like a scroll of charging, with different effects based on the Card's beatitude for Tourists; for non-Tourists, the blessed Card only charges like an uncursed scroll. Unlike the scroll, the Card has no special effect if it is invoked while you are confused.

Strategy

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card is considered one of the best artifacts in the game due to its unique charging, incredibly light weight and valuable properties, making it an enticing and somewhat common artifact wish for neutral players. It is a powerful aid when polypiling for certain weapons or magical tools, and players eating jewelry tend to use the Card to charge any applicable rings; dedicated altar farmers can also recharge their bag of tricks and create monster wands to increase their Luck and stock of sacrifice gifts to their heart's content.

Tourists completing their quest are in a particularly good position, as the Master of Thieves lacks any other resistances beyond stoning resistance. Tourists also get the most out of the artifact by far: they can use the Card for blessed charging to efficiently recharge their wand of wishing or a magic marker that they want to try to boost to 75 charges (typically requiring it to have at least 20 remaining); any other role will normally want to use a blessed scroll of charging instead. The artifact also grants more mileage from various wands and certain stat-boosting rings, as well as practically-infinite use of charged tools, without using scrolls or marker charges; this makes HP loss from artifact blasts worth braving for non-Tourists far more often than not.

With all the above perks in mind, The Platinum Yendorian Express Card is a luxury for neutral non-Tourists (albeit an excellent one to have), and they should avoid overreliance on artifacts in favor of increasing survivability where possible when wishing. Any role using the Card should have other sources of magic resistance and telepathy available alongside the Card—the Wizard of Yendor can swipe it from you and becomes far more troublesome to deal with if he does, so it is typically a good idea to bag it during the late game and ascension run.

Conducts

Neutral conduct play opens up several other considerations for using The Platinum Yendorian Express Card:

• For illiterate conduct players, The Platinum Yendorian Express Card is the only method available for them to use charging at all, particularly for various wands such as the wand of wishing and wand of death.
• Liquid-diet foodless players may seek out the Card in order to sustain their stock of nutrition-giving potions, usually by invoking it to recharge a horn of plenty.
• Pacifists are more reliant on wands than most, and will want a wish for it in order to charge essential wands and other objects, e.g. wands of fire and lightning for engraving, teleportation wands for escaping, and The Orb of Fate to gain an unlimited-use crystal ball that has no risk of exploding (on top of its valuable defensive properties).
• Eating jewelry as mentioned above can overlap with one or more conducts in other ways (e.g., obtaining resistances for pacifists, or boosting AC for nudists).

History

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card was introduced along with most of the other quest artifacts in NetHack 3.1.0.

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.

Variants

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, the charging provided by The Platinum Yendorian Express Card can enable practical long-term use of lightsabers for Jedi and other players that unrestrict the skill via crowning.

SlashTHEM

SlashTHEM introduces another artifact, the Gourd of Infinity, that can be invoked to charge items; this makes the Card less unique, though it is still a solid option for an artifact wish.

xNetHack

In xNetHack, The Platinum Yendorian Express Card actually uses platinum as its object material.

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.