I've found that eating the buds (regardless how many leaves they have) increases my chances of synthesis/desynthing w/o breaking my crystals. The 4 leaf lasts the longest out of them all, but drops seldom. Right now I'm stockpiling materials for crafting a few lvls above b4 I eat them. I managed to craft a few items that were 7 levels ahead of me, sometimes a whole ten w/o breaking a crystal using the mandy buds. >^-^<
The 3 leaf bud is not eatable unfortunately...
Edited, Apr 2nd 2009 11:10am by Ishikawa