Carbon Fiber blades are highly recommended after you can hover the heli and do basic flight w/o training gear (otherwise you'll be wasting money). They can take your everyday ding against a bush or grass or anything soft and not have any damage, where wooden blades would have the covering peeling and they'd be frayed at the tips. A few strikes like that with wooden blades and you should be getting replacements soon. The carbon fiber blades can take a huge beating before they're not flyable anymore, partly because when they start to deteriorate, they deteriorate in the exact point of impact and chip off instead of warping or having covering flying off like with the wooden blades, so just a little bit of light packing tape and you should be OK for a while. Once the damage gets extensive (say, 2 good-sized gashes along the leading or trailing edges of the blades) then it's time to retire them and get another set, but judging the abuse they've taken that's at least 3 or 4 wooden blade sets so they've already paid for themselves almost.

And then there's the performance boost. Carbon fiber blades are much stiffer so you get more consistent performance with them. When you've got rotor blades spinning upwards of 2200 rpm, any slight variation in attitude or airflow will cause a lot of stress on the blades. Wooden blades will flex much more so the airflow isn't as ideal as it should be, while carbon fiber blades barely flex at all. You will notice a very nice improvement with the carbon fiber blades, a LiPo and the Aerobatic Enhancement Kit. While they're not invincible, the carbon fiber blades are far more durable and reliable than the wooden blades.