Minecraft 1.8 came out today, but everyone was too distracted by the april fools villager takeover to notice. In 1.8 there are a lot of new features, but one that wasn't in the snapshots is emerald tools. Emerald tools are the same as diamond, but they have an extremely high "enchantability level" what that means is that it costs less levels to get high level enchantments (gold armor has this effect, but not as much as emerald)

I feel like emerald tools aren't worth it, though, because emeralds are so hard to find, and they aren't much better than diamond, but I guess since emerald was almost useles before (except for villager trading), there isn't really a better use.

Anyway, I think that emerald tools look really cool, and I hope they add emerald armor soon.