Amethyst-powered Altars

Amethyst is a beautiful material, with most players thinking the Amethyst blocks have a sort of magical feel to it. Why not take advantage of that and use amethyst for magic? Minecraft needs more magic anyway, so amethyst would be a perfect opportunity to fix that. My proposition would be a magic altar of sorts, used to give equipment special abilities such as swords ignoring a certain level of armor or, a popular request, pickaxes smelting iron, gold and copper instantly upon mining. It would require a certain number of amethyst shards to... Let's say "empower" as "enchanting" is something different. So different in fact that, without a major amount of setup, they can't be used in conjunction with each other. Or they could be entirely incompatible, meaning you would have to use one or the other. But unlike enchanting, empowering doesn't require levels, only amethyst. But that means it requires more amethyst to get a single empowerment than it would cost lapis to get a single level 30 enchantment. An altar could be crafted with three dripstone, a copper ingot and three smooth stone in a similar arrangement to anvils. Enchanting is a lot more random, so by contrast empowering should be much more controllable. It's meant to be an earlier game version of enchanting, and gives players an idea of what to expect when they obtain the ability to enchant.