Pavement is hard on tires. With our on-road touring cars, we'd only get 5 or 6 tanks of fuel to a set of rubber tires. Switching to foams more than doubled that. Since you can't use foams on your Slash, look for tires with a high Shore rating (rubber hardness). A shore number of 45 will last farily well.

On my off-road vehicles, the tires fail from getting to soft and expanding too much over time (stretched). Age will also crack the rubber. It's not often I have to replace off-road tires due to tread wear.

Rims chip and crack from impact, either from jumps or hitting an object head on. Not uncommon.

A good deal? Just look teh tires up on Tower Hobbies to see the normal price to find out. Personally, I try to support my LHS as much as I can. even though his prices are a tiny bit higher, by the time I add shipping to an E-Bay or Mail Order company, my LHS is often my best deal. That's not to say you can't find great deals over the net, but it depends on the item. I like visitng my LHS and the owner is a great guy. So naturally, I like to buy from him. He's given me free "good" parts from gear that was returned broken. Nice guy.