If you bump the cc up one more, that would probably put it on on a reasonable power curve.  Something that could potentially just sit there and own someone's strategy needs to cost 2.  To leave it as a 1/1 for 1, you have to take the recurring card advantage out of it somehow.

Yeah, the effect feels like it should be in blue along with Back to Basics and those awful spells way back when that rearranged all of the colors of everything.  How would this affect artifacts?

As was mentioned below, the abilities probably have to have the urborg panther wording.  Sacrifice a card named squid's ink, etc.  Unfortunately, that adds text to already crowded cards.

The philosopher's stone is the universal catalyst.  It should be able to transform materials at will.  If it needs to cost four, so be it.  Here's a toned-down version that still could cost 3 I think

Philosopher's Stone
Legendary Artifact
Comes into play tapped
T: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.
T: Target material's name becomes Farmer's Grain, Squid's Ink, Oak's Seed, Lizard's Egg, or Rat's Tail (you choose one).

Awkward wording aside, is this fair?  Compared to Darksteel Ingot: in exchange for losing indistructability and coming into play tapped (and the legendary drawback), it can transform materials.  If you wanted to take it back yet another notch, the last ability could be

T, tap an untapped alchemist you control: Target material's name becomes Farmer's Grain, Squid's Ink, Oak's Seed, Lizard's Egg, or Rat's Tail (you choose one).

Like the alchemist would have to spend time working to do the transformation.

Clone cards change names, so why not this?  You might have to use a scrap of paper or something to keep track if you don't use the material right away, but that's okay.

For constructed, you could avoid the renaming issue by having the ability swap out the material for one in the library, but I want this to be able to fix materials in limited where you might not have access to the right thing.

As for the blue apprentice, I'm fine with taking his power down a bit.  Make it 3 mana though (ala mana leak).  With this guy sitting on the table, the opponent will be able to play around it to some extent if he really needs to.

To make the dudes work in limited, I would want to give them a wee bit more flexibility.

Give the apprentices a weaker ability that they can use with any material.

Laboratory Apprentice
U
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Squid's Ink: Return two target permanents to their owner's hand.
T, sacrifice any material: Return target permanent to its owner's hand.
1/1

Morgue Apprentice
B
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Rat's Tail: return a creature from your graveyard into play
T, sacrifice any material: Remove up to three cards from any graveyards.
1/1

Battle-front Apprentice
R
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Lizard's Egg: Battle-front Apprentice deals 3 damage to target creatures and/or players, divided any way you choose
T, sacrifice a material card: Battle-front Apprentice deals 2 damage to target creature or player.
1/1

Naturalist Apprentice
G
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Oak's Seed: put a 2/4 green treefolk token into play.
T, sacrifice a material card: put a 1/1 green saproling token into play.
1/1

Town Apprentice
W
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Farmer's Grain: all creatures you control get protection from any one color until end of turn.
T, sacrifice a material card: target creature you control gets protection from any one color until end of turn.
1/1

Also, for a sacrifice of a material card, the alchemists should get the better apprentice ability.

Laboratory Alchemist
2U
Creature-Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Rat's Tail, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Draw five cards. You lose five life.
T, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Tap up to five non-land permanents. They don't untap during their controller's next untap phase.
T, Sacrifice a material: Return two target permanents to their owner's hand.
2/2

etc for all of them.  That gives them a wee bit more flexibility.  Will all that text fit on a card in a readable font?

I don't think there was a problem with the initial wording.  (The new name is great though.)  As Nibble said, the wording on Alphonso shouldn't allow a 2-card instant win combo.  If a card required a sacrifice of a forest and a swamp, you could not accomplish both by sacrificing a bayou.  Is there a precedent for this somewhere--a card that requires as a cost that you sacrifice two different things?  If so, I'm sure there's a ruling that sacrificing a card that counted as both things could be used to satisfy either part of the sacrifice, but not both.  If you had to be absolutely positively sure, just change the wording on alphonso to be like the other alchemists, sacrifice a, sacrifice b, ..., sacrifice e: you win.  The current wording on the stone requires you to remember what you chose, which is a pain.  Besides, the stone should have the flexibility to be whatever you need whenever you need it.  As for play balance, it's a cycling lotus petal that costs three mana.  In the spirit of the legendary philosopher's stone (which is really a catalyst more than a material itself), I would power it up to:

Philosopher's Stone (Uncommon)
3
Legendary Artifact
All materials count as Farmer's Grain, Squid's Ink, Oak's Seed, Lizard's Egg, and Rat's Tail
Sacrifice any Material: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool
T: add one mana of any color to your mana pool.

So it's not a material itself anymore, but it makes all materials interchangeable.  You can't cycle it (which increases the legendary drawback), harvest it, or buy it at the bazaar; but it's useful in and of itself as a 3-mana mox diamond.

Anything that's going to be uncommon (or especially common) needs to be almost playable in limited apart from the combo aspect.

With that in mind, I'd like to improve the materials just a wee bit.

Rat's Tail
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Add B to your mana pool
1, Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Add B to your mana pool.  Draw a card

Instead of costing you a mana to cycle it, it's potential color-fixing.  Pay a mana to get either a one-color lotus petal or a one-color chromatic sphere.

The only real question (and it's one for the masters of the card sets) is if there is a set for these to go in?  You really need at least this many cards (and maybe a few more) to flesh out the theme.  I don't know if the aztec set has room for a major theme like this?  If so, it might be good to work on flavor a bit.  If not, I guess the idea goes into cold storage.

Way way way way way back when Mirage was new, I played Disempower in a stasis deck stasis for a while.  A reusable disempower seems good.  Protecting a dude isn't what most stasis decks want to do, but it's better than instill energy on a bird.  Making this into a spellshaper might be the answer.  1/1 for G, 1G and discard for the effect.  It actually might be better in limited as a 2/2 for 2G, G and discard for the effect.

Elephant shaman?     They already made a trumpeting elephant (armadon) I think; that would have been a good name for the concept.

Disempower cost you a card and can't be reused, so the opponent can replay the disempowered card.  This removes the enchantment and makes your next draw dead.  It's just too much.  When discussing power levels, if you even have to bring up goblin welder, that's a good sign that a card is overpowered.  This is a hoser on the order of tranquil grove which costs 2 to cast, 3 to use.  2 to cast and 2 to use on a 1/1 is about as cheap as this effect ought to go.  If you want to keep it as a 1/1 for G dork that doesn't sac to the ability, you have to give the ability a drawback of some sort.

if it could be played as an instant, it would make a hell of a combat trick.  Would it be too good then?  If so, you could back it down to 2/2.

Okay, here's an expanded list of cards:

Made a material subtype.
Gave all the materials a cycling ability.
Made an apprentices cycle.
Made some other cards that play on the theme.

I think all the alchemists should just be grey ogres.  It evens out the power level, and makes them a bit easier to cast.
I gave the master alchemist a really strong ability.  He can now do any of the tricks that your other guys can do.  And he can do it more efficiently and with whatever resources are on hand (lead to gold, no problem!).

Material's Cycle (common)

Rat's Tail
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Add B to your mana pool
1, Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Draw a card


Squid's Ink
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Add U to your mana pool
1, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Draw a card

Lizard's Egg
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Lizard's Egg: Add R to your mana pool
1, Sacrifice Lizard's Egg: Draw a card

Oak's Seed
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Oak's Seed: Add G to you mana pool
1, Sacrifice Oak's Seed: Draw a card

Farmer's Grain
1
Artifact Material
Sacrifice Farmer's Grain: Add W to your mana pool
1, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain: Draw a card

Alchemist Cycle: (uncommon)

Laboratory Alchemist
2U
Creature-Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Rat's Tail, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Draw five cards. You lose five life.
T, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Tap up to five non-land permanents. They don't untap during their controller's next untap phase.
2/2

Morgue Alchemist
2B
Creature-Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Lizard's Egg, Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Target opponent sacrifices two creatures. Morgue Alchemist deals damage equal to the greatest power of a creature sacificed in this way to target player.
T, Sacrifice Squid's Ink, Sacrifice Rat's Tail: Draw five cards. You lose five life.
2/2

Battle-Front Alchemist
2R
Creature-Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Oak's Seed, Sacrifice Lizard's Egg: Put into play two 4/1 Elemental Tokens with haste and trample. Sacrifice these token's at end of turn.
T, Sacrifice Rat's Tail, Sacrifice Lizard's Egg: Target opponent sacrifices two creatures. Morgue Alchemist deals damage equal to the greatest power of a creature sacificed in this way to target player.
2/2

Naturalist Alchemist
2G
Creature- Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Lizard's Egg, Sacrifice Oak's Seed: Put into play two 4/1 Elemental Tokens with haste and trample. Sacrifice these token's at end of turn.
T, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain, Sacrifice Oak's Seed: Put into play two 5/8 Elemental tokens with defender. Whenever these tokens deal combat damage, yo gain that much life.
2/2


Town Alchemist
2W
Creature- Alchemist
T, Sacrifice Oak's Seed, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain: Put into play two 5/8 Elemental tokens with defender. Whenever these tokens deal combat damage, yo gain that much life.
T, Sacrifice Farmer's Grain, Sacrifice Squid's Ink: Tap up to five non-land permanents. They don't untap during their controller's next untap phase.
2/2

Apprentice alchemist cylce (C):

Laboratory Apprentice
U
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Squid's Ink: Return two target permanents to their owner's hand.
1/1

Morgue Apprentice
B
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Rat's Tail: return a creature from your graveyard into play
1/1

Battle-front Apprentice
R
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Lizard's Egg: deals 3 damage to target creatures and/or players, divided any way you choose
1/1

Naturalist Apprentice
G
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Oak's Seed: put a 2/4 green treefolk token into play
1/1

Town Apprentice
W
Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice Farmer's Grain: all creatures you control get protection from any one color until end of turn
1/1


Barney, Master Alchemist (Rare)
WUBRG
Legendary Creature-Alchemist
T, sacrifice  Farmer's Grain, Squid's Ink, Oak's Seed, Lizard's Egg, and Rat's Tail: You win the game.
T, Sacrifice a material: You may play an activated ability of any other alchemist in play without paying its cost.
2/4

Raw Material (Uncommon)
3
Artifact Material
Counts as Farmer's Grain, Squid's Ink, Oak's Seed, Lizard's Egg, and Rat's Tail
Sacrifice Raw Material: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool
Sacrifice Raw Material: Draw a card.

Resource Harvester (uncommon)
3
Artifact Creature
When Resource Harvester damages an opponent, you may search your library for a material card and put it in your hand.
1/3

Recycling Plant (uncommon)
3
Artifact
T, discard a card: return a material card from the graveyard to your hand.

Alchemical Bazaar (uncommon)
Land
Tap: Add one colorless mana to your mana pool
Tap: Shuffle a material card you control from play into your library.  Search your library for a material card and put it into your hand.

Alchemical Academy (rare)
Land
Tap: Add one colorless mana to your mana pool
Tap: Shuffle an alchemist you control from play into your library.  Search your library for an alchemist card and put it into your hand.

Zuchini, you realize that defender = wall, right?

The cards all suck so much they would never see play in limited (on their own).  Even as commons, the cards wouldn't turn up enough to make this a possible draft strategy.  Of course, if you put these in a basic set, you could put cards in the expansions that played on the theme.  Maybe a cylce of apprentice alchemists 1/1 for a colored mana that could tap and sacrifice a material to do some little trick.  Maybe a dude that could fetch materials from your deck.  Like an artifact dude 1/3 for 3--every time it deals damage to your opponent, search your deck for a material and put it in your hand.  Ophidian for materials.  Maybe a raw material artifact.  Artifact, 3 to cast, counts as a rat tail, squids ink, egg, seed, grain, etc.  Sacrifice for any color mana.  Maybe a recycling plant that could bring back materials from the graveyard.  Artifact.  3 to cast.  Tap and discard a card to return a material to your hand.  Maybe an academy that could promote apprentices to alchemists and alchemists to masters.  Land.  Taps for colorless mana.  x, sacrifice an alchemist: search your library for an alchemist with cmc of x and put it into play.  Maybe an alchemists swap meet.  Land.  Taps for colorless mana.  Tap and shuffle a material from play into your library to put a material card from your library into play.

I'm not normally a big fan of concepts that build too much of people's decks for them, but this does seem kind of fun.

Tweaks to existing cards:
Do the alchemists really have to have two colored mana in the cost?  They would play better together (and in limited) with only one mana in the cost.
Could the 4/1 hasty guys have trample?
Could the materials get an added ability of 1, maybe 2, sacrifice <this>: draw a card

Or maybe if it only returned enchantments to the owners hand.  That could probably be G for 1/1 with a Tap and G activation.

An activation of 1G isn't enough.  I'm not sure 2G is either.  It needs a cc of at least 2 (and stay a 1/1).  Something that hoses enchantments this badly needs to suck in the absence of enchantments.  Here's an idea that could keep it fair at 1cc: tap and pay G to put target enchantment AND <this> on top of owner's library.  That creates more of a stalemate situation if they keep playing enchantments and you keep playing this.  Now such stalemates could be annoying if there's nothing else in play to keep the game moving, so this idea may require a little tweaking.  Something like that is needed to keep the power level in check though.

In a 55-card format, "average" decks that couldn't be cut five cards would soon find themselves bettered by decks that could.    You really want to play the minimum for all the obvious reasons people have stated.  We've already mentioned two semi-legitimate reasons to break the rule:

1)  Deck strategy necessitates a few (or many) extra cards--stasis, thoughtlash, battle of wits.  The enormous drawback of playing extra cards in type one pretty much sinks these strategies in any case.

2)  Fine-tuning mana ratios.  I've never done this myself, but some people swear that they've determined that 23/60 is too few and 24/60 is too much, but 24/61 is just right for a certain deck's mana curve.  I'm skeptical that the amount of playtesting you can accomplish in this lifetime could determine a correct ratio so precisely to want to play an extra card, but theoretically, you could.

One other good reason is decks that play intuition.  Intuition encourages you to play at least 3 of some cards.  Sometimes this can make it suboptimal to cut to 60.  Not usually (hardly ever really), but sometimes.

Just having a lot of tutors (or survival) does not justify playing a utility card as the 61st card.  I think everybody understands the acid test a card has to pass to be considered as a 61st card in this scenario:

Will having this card in the deck provide me enough utility to overcome the times when I draw it instead of the key cards and broken cards that make the deck work?

Now you may well answer yes in the case of a certain utility card they want to add.  But what most people don't always remember is that in a 61-card deck, every single card has to pass the acid test.  Every card has to be evaluated: am I willing to play this as a 61st card?  I haven't seen a case where I felt they all could.

A dwarven engineer wouldn't break stuff--it could be a goblin or an orc.

This seems a wee bit strong for the cost.  Even if you took away the first strike part, it's a bit strong.  If you took away the conditional haste, it would be about right.  But the idea of having haste against a tapped out opponent is neat.

Why not bump the cost up to 3R?  In exchange, give him mountainwalk.  It's fitting if he's going to be riding a goat.

Minor wording critique I brought up before, but didn't get incorporated:  They are GREEN elephant tokens.

Power level seems about right.  The most powerful interaction I can think of here would be with Oath of Druids.  Send a bunch (but not all) of your library to your graveyard, draw a few cards.  Because you can choose the cards to remove, it has the secondary effect of improving your draw quality once you eventually shuffle everything back in with gaea's blessing.  That's certainly not the most broken thing you can do with oath.  This would have been an expecially cool card in the flashback/threshold block.

The casting cost and zero toughness/life thing make this seem like it should be a lich of some sort.  I really like the idea.  Besides bad moon, what other practical ways does black have to keep it alive?  Does anything pump zombie's toughness?

simian grunts....  XXX feels like a sorcery, but in terms of play balance, it could be instant I think.  4 mana minimum makes it an expensive combat trick.

Sorry, I didn't mean confound.  I meant fatigue.  An example of a stupid card whose existance was justified by saying it was skill-testing, ie bad players would play it in limited.

Also, it might be best to leave off trample just because it would be more compatible with other 3/3 elephant tokens.  If you left it off, then you just have a hill giant that can be doubled for 7 and tripled for 10.  That's pretty fair.  It's a bit weaker than call of the herd that let you break up the 7cc to get the two elephants, but that's ok.  Don't forget to make the elephants green.

if you downgrade the discard from duress-style to random, that takes the power down a bit.  Not much though--by the time the angel gets online, their hand will probably be mostly empty anyway.

Also if you make the vigilance activated (pay W for a turn) instead of free, that makes it a bit weaker as well as adding a certain symmetry amongst the colors and abilities.

If you're going to do a blue rack and ruin, why not use rack and ruin's cost

For 2U, you could have it target two spells and/or abilities.

For 2U plus putting your own effect or spell on the stack, it's combination counterspell and stifle.  If your opponent does try to get tricky on the stack (or if you can lure him into a stackwar by responding to his spell or effect somehow), you can abuse him.

Clearing the stack (could you counter combat damage, too?) seems a bit much for 3.

Of course the current intent seems to be not rack and ruin, but another confound, ie something the worst 10% of players will include in their limited decks (once).  Then again, UU cost makes it unwieldy for limited.  Even half the bad players will realize that, so maybe just 5%.  Maybe if we want something interesting, it should go to a new thread.

It would be even cooler to give the cards a tribal ability.  Instead of sacrifice <this>, sacrifice <this type>

You might have to adjust the costs or activations slightly, but probably not much.

Turning a bunch of saprolings into a bunch of land just seems really fun.

What if it only hit spells or effects controled by your opponent?  Then you couldn't just put a throwaway effect on the stack and use it to counter something.  It could only stop opponents who stack their effects.

How about counter two target spells or effects?  If your intention is not just to make it suck, letting it hit effects (maybe just activated effects) would make it very interesting.

You shouldn't ever shuffle facing away from yourself for the obvious reason your friend knew: you show your deck.  If you can't shuffle straight down, just shuffle toward yourself a few times while looking completely the other direction.  That should be ok.

The angel/final fortune situation is an easy call, provided you get into the infinite combo during the regular time in the round--you should just win.  If you are already in extra turns when you get the combo together, then it's trickier.  I would have to say that you don't win, because you are limited to five turns at that point, and you require more turns than that to win.

With the dragon/blessing situation, it comes down to this: there is no rule explicitly requiring  a player to concede defeat just because his probability of victory can be made arbitrarily small.  Stalling is not an issue here.  So you can't really disagree with the ruling.  The players just have to shuffle, shuffle, shuffle until the dragon player gets lucky, his opponent quits, he chooses to exit the loop, or time runs out.  You might think that it's desirable to have a rule that would prevent such boring occurences.  The trouble is that it takes high school level mathematics (limits, probability theory) to explain to a player that you can make his chances of victory arbitrarily small--that is, for any finite non-zero probability he can name, you can make his probability of victory smaller than that.  Lots of elementary schoolkids play magic (some play in tournaments) and a rule like that just couldn't fly.

The only part of all this that isn't clear from reading the rules is under what circumstances a judge can/should set an absolute time limit on the five extra turns at the end of this round.  Such a rule is necessary, (I've had to impose such limits a few times and actually terminate a match once) but not explicitly called out in the floor rules.