The other commenters are all correct, but I wanted to say something I didn't see mentioned: you can totally do it, it's trivial to imagine a working gear with 13 teeth. But you can't make two smaller gears that have a ratio of 1:13, because 13 is prime, so you literally have to make it be 1 gear. That means the 1:1151 ratio literally has to be 1 big gear, which is hard to make.

You do have a misunderstanding about the wear. Unless your gear is oscillating back and forth, it will always move in a complete circle and always wear the teeth evenly. Note that the involute tooth design leads to less wear on an individual tooth, but it doesn't have to do with how many teeth are on the gear.