From Minecraft’s page:

Copper is officially becoming an equipment tier! Its durability sits somewhere between stone and iron, which reflects onto the equipment you craft from it, be it a weapon, tool, or piece of armor. For example, a copper pickaxe will help you mine a bit faster and for a bit longer than a stone pickaxe but won’t allow you to mine any additional materials – you'll still need to upgrade to iron for that. Its abundance makes copper the perfect early-game material, which means I won’t have to scour dark caves holding a stone sword in search of a morsel of iron. Yay!

The faster efficiency of copper combined with the cheap cost sounds pretty good for me personally because I do a lot of tunnel digging through mountains, and using iron for that feels too expensive.

But I feel like if Mojang is going to keep adding armor and tool variants, they need to do more than just affect durability. They need to have a reason to wear it for more than just a day or two. For example: gold protects you from piglins, and leather boots allow you to walk on snow. That gives it a purpose beyond decorating armor stands once you have the next tier.

Overall though, I do like the new armor and tools. They seem pretty neat!

Thoughts?