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One concern I have is that of ingredients rarity. If the ingredients are fixed then it's an easy matter to say "mandrake root is used for the more powerful potions, therefore it should be hard to get hold of" - but if the ingredients vary from character to character you can no longer do that. You lose the supply and demand aspects of ingredients trading.
Having said that, I suppose you could get around the problem by dividing the ingredients into rarity levels, and then saying (for example) that a healing potion requires two common ingredients and one slightly uncommon, while a potion of invulnerability requires three rare ingredients, etc.
Another way might be to say that the ingredients are fixed, but that you need to learn the recipe IC before you can use it. You might use google to discover that you need a snail shell, a piece of steelwood bark and a pinch of powdered iron can be combined to create a barkskin potion, but unless your character also knows, you won't be able to create the potion. This would allow the recipes to be made more fitting to the potion type, but the major drawback is that you could no longer experiment. It also raises the question of how anyone would learn a recipe in the first place (although that might fit well with an additional research-based puzzle system I've been thinking of, based on searching through books rather than mixing potions, with the options based on the library you're using - the 'find and trade' aspects I wanted to handle with recipe cards could instead be handled through the discovery of lost tomes of magic, with the more basic recipes being discoverable by spending time searching through city libraries).
A third possibility would be to say that each ingredient has two values, with the first being used to determine the potion type and the second being adjusted by the character ID to generate a side affect. You might look up on the web that snail shell, steelwood bark and powdered iron can be used for the barkskin spell, but then discover that replacing steelwood bark with silverwillow bark provides a longer duration, while replacing the snail shell with a tortoise shell gives a stronger defensive bonus and a minor speed penalty. Having said that, I don't think this system would be a solution in its own right, as the websites would just list all possible ingredients and then just note that their bonuses varied.
The recipe cards could also be used as an optional alternative to teaching - Alice could teach Bob (at which point he has to use his own ingredients), or she could just give him a recipe card (allowing him to use hers - but then preventing him from teaching it to anyone else, although he could just sell the card). Perhaps Alice could even set a limit on the number of potions each card could be used for, allowing her to hold a monopoly on certain potion types without having to spend all her waking hours spawning potions. Perhaps 'recipe card' wouldn't be the best name for it, but that's really just a cosmetic issue.
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