Making diamonds

[The Mighty Buzzard]

I'd be willing to accept permanence of a transformation for free in some cases... but I'd still push for the player to pay extra shifts for "authenticity"... again, making yourself into a wolf that's close enough to a wolf to fool a biologist is a lot harder than it seems... same goes for diamonds no matter how regular the patterns are... after all, not all diamonds are created equal. The carbon structure in diamonds has never been found to be perfect, and the flaws that occur naturally and in artificially made ones are easy to spot with even a skilled optical inspection- the artificial ones stand out, and are considered less valuable (because they're less rare, and the value of rare minerals is almost entirely a result of their rarity).
Make one too regular, too unflawed, and you're likely to get a lot of unwanted attention.
Make it flawed the wrong way, and it loses value, or worse, mimics a variety of conflict or blood diamonds.

Excellent point.

Also... minor point to mention. Currently, they can test the mineral content, what ever was in the soil the diamond was born in, and identify WHERE it came from. What would it show, in this case? If you used carbon from coal in Minnesota, would it read as a Minnesota diamond? Or would it come to match what ever sample you used as a template.
Ooooooooo, would you not get to reduce shifts, if you used the magical property of similarity and used a sample to set the "Pattern" and just matched the material to that? So, steal one diamond, and use it as a "Template" to work Geo-Alchemy and make more.

Good thinking and good idea with the template.  A lot like using a seed diamond when growing them in a lab.

Also, make enough and DuBose and the others in the diamond kartel will come gunning for you. Same goes for the emerald kartel in Brazil, and the Ruby kartel in india. They frown upon competition. Not to mention, you can kill the price, by removing the rarity.
Personally, I plan to get rich by harvesting unreachable platinum under the oceans. Thats just a question of Detection and transportation. No one "owns" it and you CANT glut the market, Platinum is ALWAYS needed, to get the Fuel Cell research going.

Could make for an interesting story arc, yeah?  If you're running a pre-TC campaign it's almost certain to be the rampires running the cartels out of Brazil.  No idea for african diamonds.  Indian Rubies could even land you a pissy rakshasa or contracted hitters for the Jade Court.

[BumblingBear]

The problem with applying realism to magic in this setting is that magic in the setting explicitly follows something nearly indistinguishable from narrative law.

This is a great point.

[The Mighty Buzzard]

The problem with applying realism to magic in this setting is that magic in the setting explicitly follows something nearly indistinguishable from narrative law.

Depends a lot your audience then.  Me, I dig on bits where Jim goes more in depth on the "how" of magic.  Makes it feel less like a Deus Ex Machina and draws me further into the story.  I like to carry that over to the games I run or play too.  Admittedly, sometimes up to the point where it looks like it might soon start boring people but hey, you can't hit the target dead center every time.