Once upon a time, pre-1.13, before new runewords came to dominate the meta, there was a Horadric Cube recipe that rerolled affixes on magical (blue) items. It was simple: three chipped gems + magical item. During this time, if one were to find an etheral, six-socket magical weapon in the wild, say a Colossus Blade, the person could reroll the magical affixes to in hopes of rolling Cruel (prefix) & of Quickness (suffix). Cruel Colossus Blade of Quickness were a huge part of the meta back in the day, and were always fun (and frustrating) to start a new character just so you could farm chipped gems throughout normal in hopes of rerolling your way to greatness. Man, it would be great to reroll jewels. I’d love to reroll into the classic 40%ed/15ias.
I am certain there are other hardcore, old school D2 people out there like myself that would love other options to play other than late-game runewords, not to mention the glory of fulfilling nostalgia.
Please, dev team. If you really want to preserve this game, then bring back some of the old school Cube recipes, especially the recipe for rerolling magical affixes (regardless of item level).
Also, please, at the very least, make gems stackable in the stash. 
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That recipe is still in the game. I don’t know about earlier versions, but I don’t ever recall magical items being able to roll with six sockets, and even then, the Jeweler’s affix would not last through the cubing process…am I missing something? I started playing in 1.09 but didn’t spend a ton of time cubing.
To be honest, I don’t even see the recipe listed anymore on Arreat Summit. I know that a few years ago, the recipe was still displayed as the most recently updated, and had in parentheses that it had a level cap of (I believe) 25. That means that you’d only be able to reroll magical affixes on items with an item level of 25 or less, ergo wouldn’t work on Exceptional or Elite items, nor would produce tier-3 magical affixes.
I last played Diablo 2 in 2018 and the the recipe did not work on magical items from Hell (say, ilevel<60).
No, you’re right; the 3 chipped gems adds sockets and rerolls the magic properties, but sets the ilvl to 25, so it can’t roll Cruel (ilvl 55). You can cube 3 regular gems and a socketed weapon and add magic properties to it, but then the ilvl is only 30. You can reroll a magic item with 3 flawless gems and get sockets, but still ilvl 30.
The best you could do is get a magic colossus blade, use the PGems to keep rerolling until you get Cruel and Quickness, then have Larzuk add 2 sockets.
I just double checked Arreat Summit, and the recipe is still listed on there:
Blockquote 3 Flawless Gems + 1 Magic Weapon = Socketed Magic Weapon
This adds sockets to a magic weapon. The original magic weapon properties will be removed (rerolled) when the new weapon is created. If you use this formula with a weapon that is not normally socketed such as a Javelin, this recipe will create a new magical weapon without any sockets. ilvl=30 magic weapon with 1-2 sockets.
The old recipe used to not have the last bit, and if memory serves, I believe the old recipe allowed you to potentially roll max sockets on an item in addition to rerolling the affixes.