Terra didn't seem to make much sense as a character upon first trying her but I've worked out a hilarious way of building a terrable terraforming deck. You move around, break tiles, throw things at people, rinse and repeat. This guide is about doing that as effectively as possible. This guide ONLY covers Terra's base "break" loadout and not the #2 alternate Pyro loadout. This guide explains the most simple and fundamental concept behind her break loadout and nothing more. It's up to you what you would like to build on top of it.

I've tried Terra a few times since the last update but I don't think her build or style has changed much.

Reasons to Terraform Terrably: (END BOSS IS IN THIS VIDEO)


(Late late game run of Terra with OP stuff.) https://youtu.be/8oflb5qq8nM

This terraforming deck is sustained off of a few central points:
1. It relies on many tiles being broken as often as possible.
2. It is reliant on good RNG for upgrading Terra's starting excavate card. No matter how well you play, you are gated by how effective your excavate will be.
3. Big money. You need lots of it to purchase upgrades over and over, being able to afford 2-3 removals can be very helpful.

This Terraforming deck is simple to learn while having lots of potential because your deck cycling process is simple and can be done at your own pace. There are some tough moves you can do such as learning to block bosses/enemies from moving/attacking by breaking tiles. (This does not really help against the gate, sadly. In fact, Terra is terrable against the gate.) This deck- because the way it does damage and the fact that you can block bosses from moving- makes it feel like a cheese deck to me, but definitely takes some learning as you figure out exactly how you like your deck built.

Before I begin:
I try to label artifacts [a] by adding an [a] suffix to all artifacts mentioned in this post and make Spells bold.
If you know what to do and only want my take, skip to the cards section.
This guide is and only is a guide for how to play the most basic form of Terra. It does not even include other possibilities such as flow cards.
'excavate' = 'excav'

This whole thing is about 3500 words long which seems like overkill. On the upside, it is very comprehensive. If you don't know what you're doing this will tell you everything I know. If you know this game well, I have done my best to make clear which sections are not really going to be teaching you anything new.

This guide is only up-to-date for 1.4! (Some day I will update it for the newest version. You will be missing artifacts and spells that have been released since 1.4)
This is up-to-date as of 2025 :D

The fundamental way this deck functions and why Terra exists is for you to break/crack tiles, burn excavate (damage spell), clean up the board with flat earth (fix broken tiles) and pick up its shield, shuffle, and then repeat. The spells which you want for this deck are explained in detail in the next section.

When you play Terra, it isn't about picking up expensive 5-mana cards but about upgrading the excavate spell over and over and picking up cards that help the excavate card. Excav upgrades are so important that if you don't get something really good like doublecast (D) at the first shopkeeper, it is very worthwhile to redo your run.

In combat you have damage from your main weapon (20 base damage) and your spells to toy with. Terra also starts with moonstone [a], an artifact giving her +.2 mana regen per broken tile. The more broken tiles, the more your mana regen, so I try to mindlessly be constantly moving around to break tiles. Best to do this with spells. For the most part, look to spend your time feeding damage into excavate, a spell that deals damage proportional to how many tiles are broken. You usually start out the round with very little mana and damage.
To get the process going just give the mana regeneration a little push. Break tiles consistently so that you have enough mana to use spells at your leisure. Note that you cannot break tiles which people are standing on. Those tiles are cracked and will never help you unless someone walks off of them. The rest is simple. You burn excavate and laugh as 800-1500 damage drops on people in one hit. This process is often about intuition on mana, what cards you have access to and what enemies you need to kill and how.

I've upgraded exav many times and I think I've seen all possible upgrades. If by chance I haven't seen the best ones, it doesn't matter because it's really not that hard to figure out what you want. This section is honestly the least important section to read anyway.

Doublecast (D) (2x, +1mana) means exav casts once, then once again after a short delay, doubling your shots. The second cast of doublecast offers a benefit in that it usually hits bosses if they try to dodge cast #1, so at least this makes it so not all your damage misses. Oh, yeah and if you can trap bosses, then doublecast will hit.

Fragile (R) (+50%) fragile increases your total damage by half, not double. The first excavate rock that hits will NOT have fragile applied. It is not as great as doublecast, however, with magnifying glass [a] (150% -> 200%), it is. With magnifying glass, the question is if you want to spend +1 mana cost to cast the spell twice or do you prefer Fragile (R)'s no extra cost. Sometimes I feel almost inclined to take fragile and keep mana costs low if the run hasn't blessed me with mana crystals.

Critical (J)(+50%) gives you a 1/4 chance to deal double damage. That comes out to half on average. This is my least favorite upgrade purely because I dislike RNG. J is really sub-par because it has no chance to synergize with artifacts unlike with fragile.

Splash (W), adds an ADDITIONAL 20% damage in a 3x3. Splash has good potential against the gate boss when it hits in the NINE surrounding tiles, but I should say I lack experience with it because I have rarely seen it for some reason. Note that W can kill hostages if you don't tune your damage properly. Otherwise it's not so bad despite giving up potential damage in my view because it helps against multiple enemies and the gate which are things that Terra struggles against.

I originally didn't advocate any more upgrades than the ones I mentioned but I think it's up to you to now-
Someone in the comments suggested frost (G) - but the frost (G) upgrade has since been nerfed. It no longer adds 150 damage per 3 stacks of frost (150 dmg/3 applications), but has a 25% chance to apply. The math is simple: If you have 12 tiles cracked, (12*¼*⅓=1), in 12 tiles you can expect to apply frost once, which is 150 damage. This is not great.

HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT WHEN PLAYING TERRA
If you have a few tiles broken and one (D) upgrade, you can expect 500 damage.
(25 base x 8 tiles broken x 2 = 500)
On a very good run, if you have double edge[a] and glass cannon [a] you will have +8 spell power. With the best single-target upgrades (doublecast,fragile @200%,doublecast)
(33 x 16 tiles x 4 = 2100)
Realistically speaking, I would expect 800-1500 damage from my average deck dumps from exav. I rarely obtain D, D and R.

The weakness of this deck is actually that your DPS is gated by how quickly you can break fresh tiles or use spells that break tiles. (I habitually hit E every single time I move anywhere. For instance against Violette, I am guaranteed to constantly have some source of mana regeneration because she makes you walk everywhere.)

Learning to cycle your deck quickly is what you want to learn. There will be shuffles where you spent lots of time dodging and will only be dumping 200 damage on people, and these are the shuffles you want to shuffle through quickly. Don't hold onto a bad shuffle. This deck is about spam.



The more I play Terra's Terrable Terraforming deck, the more I ended up streamlining the deck. The first time I played, I probably added flow cards and other random one. Now, I often consider if I want to spend money getting rid of two of Terra's Terrable starting spells: Poison tails and flurry (2 mana, 240 dmg over time) which pushes targets away. (Her 1.4 deck used to have Mine)

To explain the thinking behind this so you don't have to:
I have frequently ran into fights (not easy ones either) where I simply need to get past a spell that is just completely useless and costs a lot of my current mana. I know that mine, which did 250 damage, was nothing to be scoffed at. And now, poison tails seems like it's a 'synergistic' card with flurry. Some of those cards offer enough damage or utility that I have a hard time deciding if I want to kick it out. I won't go further and make a recommendation either way, instead, tell you how to decide if it's helpful or not.

Know that this deck ultimately builds towards an absolute faceroll of a deck. You want to be pressing Q and W as quickly as you possibly can eventually and you won't even consciously know what you're doing. When a spell gets in the way of that, you need to question if it's helpful and if it's doing damage every time you empty your deck out.

~~~
I'm leaving this paragraph on the Mine in because sometimes I wonder if it got the developer to decide to replace the Mine in her kit with Flurry and Poison Tails. :-)

The cards you want in your deck can depend on how much you're struggling at the moment. At the very start of the game? I hate the mine. Mana is tough to come by and the mine is straight up garbage. It costs 2 out of your 3 total mana and it might just miss. Also, the mine can land on broken tiles. When mana is plentiful and life is good, the mine is nice and fine. Press W and move on. When it hits, big damage drops on people. However IF you're trying to dodge everything so you have a hard time breaking tiles and IF you don't have the benefit of good mana regeneration, when this card or another gets in the way of a 4 or 5 max mana pool, you will hate it. It will block you from not just your guaranteed exav damage, but from cycling through the rest of your more important deck, AND hurt your DPS/mana regen in the amount of time it takes to get back that 2 mana back. I suggest applying this principle throughout your run otw to Eden.

There are actually only 4-5 spells to this deck... which I consider are crucial to its function.

You gotta catch them all...? This deck feels like garbage without its core spells. Therefore, prioritize double hearth until you have what you want (Know that brand specialization reduces a temporary type of luck for spells)
If you believe you want this deck to flow as well, or maybe add fire, or high-mana cost spells, that will all be dependent on how you execute the terraforming process and what are the circumstances and RNG you meet in-game. For instance, when you have wings [a] you can walk over broken tiles. I found that spells which cracked tiles on the left half of the board made bossing extremely dangerous. With wings, there are dangerous tile-cracking spells such as earthen armor that go from dangerous to awesome.

This just focuses on building the basic, most efficient noncomplex deck. You should feel free to add or experiment with flames or another spell you find really necessary or synergistic. I will only talk about the deck I know and can advocate is the simplest and most fundamental way to play Terra's Terrable Terraforming deck.


Let me lay out an example of an optimal deck for you (not including artifacts).
If I'm lucky, I have a deck which will be cycled through...

• 1 Ion cannon [Center 2x2 crack]
  
• 1 Fissure [8-tile row crack]
  
• 1 Orbital Beam [4 breaks]
  
• 2 Entangle [3s root]
  
• 3 Excavate [Exav]
  
• 4 Flat Earth [Breaking tiles=10 shielding, Instantly fixes all broken tiles]

Three (and a half) components are what make this deck this deck.

• Tile breakers (terraforming weapons and spells)
  
• Excavate
  
• Flat Earth (Praise be to allah for giving us this spell)
  
• Root spells (This is more like half a component rather than a full component)

Root spells are actually not fair to call a necessity to this deck by all means to me. They are nice and good to have without a question, but not only are there ways of guaranteeing for you to hit dodging bosses when you box them inside broken tiles, root spells simply not a necessary part of the trinity of tile break, exav, cleanup and reset. If you center your spell dump around your root, that may be a mistake. The root is there to help enhance the deck.
This being said, you can replace entangle with whatever other root spell you like. I recommend spells which provide a long duration of root.

I actually think that flat earth is what makes Terra safe and strong. My first few runs, I didn't know flat earth existed. Without flat earth, Terra just becomes a high burst character that feels unsafe to play and is all about your DPS>their DPS. Flat earth makes Terra feel more like a MMORPG character. You dump your deck and cast healing buffs for yourself. Flat earth makes Terra far more forgiving to play. She can be called well-rounded with flat earth.

RECOMMENDED WITH WINGS [a] [Walk on broken tiles]
• Prophecy [6-tile random row crack, 6 second delay]
  
• Tile Fire [120 row damage, BREAKS tiles above and below]
  
• Earthen armor [Cracks adj. tiles, +40 shield]
  
• Tremor [140 line dmg., crack/fixes tiles when noflow/yesflow]
  
• Earth Wyrm (D) [3-tile range, infinite cast]

When you take these 5 listed spells without wings [a], I personally recommend you not to focus on dealing damage with them. I recommend to not rely on damage from prophecy, or to hit things with tile fire. I take these spells because they break/crack tiles, and the fact that they do damage is nice.
The reason why I stopped bringing earthen armor, tremor, or tile fire in my decks is because against certain bosses, cracks will get you killed if you can't keep track of your own broken tiles. My conclusion is that tile fire and earth wyrm are the two most dangerous spells you can take when you lack wings. Prophecy is an amazing spell for guaranteeing huge amounts of damage because it guarantees 6 cracks at once. What's better than to shuffle right before prophecy lands? However, bosses such as Evil Terra or Icy become way tougher when random rows are broken. Furthermore, earthen armor and tremor are buddy-buddy cards. You cast earthen armor and then tremor within a tenth of a second- you get 40 shielding, toss 140 damage in a row for 1 total mana cost. But that combo doesn't actually help you break any tiles. Worse, when the order of these two spells doesn't work out, one of them probably ends up breaking tiles on your side of the board. Given flat earth, I see no need for earthen armor when you lack wings [a].

is great, you will block enemies and force them into pockets on the board, cycle damage, and lastly give yourself a shield before cleaning the board up and letting you start the cycle again.
Notice that with some practice and a full deck, it should be easy to crack at least 8-10 of the 16 tiles on the right side each rinse.
You'll notice this is a very small deck, and that's fine. The shortest amount of time it may take from start to shuffle would be 4-5 seconds when you're working in absolutely ideal conditions. However, when you're busy dodging, you might be distracted or think that there are too few broken tiles to make casting exav worthwhile. This is fair, but usually you will want to just burn exav, flat earth to cycle next and have a fresh deck to give guaranteed breaks and also to pick up the shields from flat earth from this current shuffle.

I do not believe that Terra is a flow-based character, however some cards provide enough synergy that Terra's deck will morph well into an effective flow deck. It's really barrier that brings them together (30 shield) but I do not think that flow helps you do what this deck is based around: Terraforming. The terraforming process is not the rock cycle. You crack tiles, break them, root bosses, hit terraform & cycle. If you think you can keep up the tile-reliant DPS of this deck while adding in the high mana costs of high-end flow cards, you should include flow. I simply have not called on flow because I have not found a convenient way to make it reliable as opposed to liable. Also, note that some flow spells require some time to aim for effectiveness, during which you could be losing tiles to being reset. Be careful about what you gain and lose when adding flow.

On terraforming: As of patch 1.4 unfortunately, Terra's main weapon is called Terraform, which cracks tiles. The card which does the damage is called excavate. If you look at the picture of this guide, it's a picture of a colossus in the process of terraforming a planet with probable gigawatts or terrawatts of power. It seems to me that the spell doing 25 points of damage should be called terraform while Terra's main weapon should be called excavate, considering that the real-life process of excavating dirt makes holes in the ground, not makes dirt fly out of the ground and attack people. The most important action of this deck seems less suited to be called excavation.

This section discusses 'other' types of cards you can choose to include.

Terra is a hearth deck. With few exceptions Hearth is all that I have found matters to Terra's terrable terraforming deck. But increasing spell power will dramatically increase damage from excavate.
You do not need any ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mana restoration spells at all.

Flow cards, hearth or not are a maybe.

I don't discuss any of the prismatic highest-rarity cards since they're all very powerful, require tons of mana, and might vary significantly in synergy with your artifacts or some random spells you picked up. If you like one of the highest rarity spells, you can just choose if you want it. It just might require adding some mana crystals... Maybe it works great, maybe not.

I don't usually take cards that break tiles on our side of the field like tremor or tile fire - but I do take prophecy. I used to and then they got me killed a few times so I gave up. But if you do builda flow deck, do take tremor! (or whatever else you want that does flow stuff)

There are other random cards out there that you can always think about picking up that I won't identify individually since they range from focus (gain 2 spell power) or hired gun. Or glassify, which adds fragile to enemies. Or like, if you get a card such as overload (unlimited mana for 6 seconds), yeah - you could try to build up to the required 6 mana to cast it if it's not too hard to do that.

But these are 'random' cards (that aren't highest rarity) outside the hearth deck I consider that actually have some real synergy with the 'break' terra deck:
I really like cataclysm, which cracks all outer tiles but adds a 2-second increase to the shuffle. There are way more tiles on the outer ring than in the center four.
Echo is obviously great for the potential to cast excavate again (or even more times).
If you get eternity cannon, you could justify swapping into a flow deck.
If you get barrier, which gives 30 shield per flow, you can decide if you want to try out a 'break' terra deck that also flows.

I don't take Kinesys cards. I could be wrong about not taking them, however. You should decide if it's worth it pushing enemies off of potentially cracked, but not broken tiles. There are some spells in Kinesys that require you to stand still. I don't think standing still is a great idea in 'break' terra, but that's actually your call.

I don't think you should take diamond ring, which gives you 4 shield per second when held.

The artifacts which are pertinent to this deck are very straightforward and really are pretty self-explanatory. Since artifacts are often really obvious choices, even if you didn't read this section of the guide you would still probably know what you want. The exception to that statement is that some artifacts, namely wings [a], opens up the option for you to pick up other cards that break tiles (earthen armor).

• Wings [a] The importance of this artifact is discussed in the optimal spells section. You cannot really expect to have this artifact except on fairly high difficulties & luck, however.
  
• Candy Wrapper [a] will only help you, although it is not really the same as wings. It takes a bit of skill to get used to using since it lets you wrap around the top and bottom of the stage.
  
• Magnifying glass [a] (Fragile = 200% damage) fragile makes the fragile upgrade to excav deal as much damage as doublecast.
  
• Glass Cannon [a] This spell adds 4 spell power to excav base damage at very little cost
  
• Uranium [a] Same as glass cannon, I think it's worth the spell power.
  
• Granite [a] Adds 10 shield on tile break

While it's up to you for how you want to play this deck and what you think is efficient- similar to cashflow, you do not want your supply (mana/s) and capacity (max mana) of mana to gate your damage. Yes, her starting artifact grants exceptional mana regeneration (+.2) on each broken tile, but there is occasional downtime you have to deal with.

Therefore with this deck I find I have only one major problem: At the beginning of rounds, tiles are not broken and mana regeneration is slow to the point that I can be unable to clear distress stages safely. (Terra is bad at distress stages early on). For this reason, I believe SOME small amount of static mana regen is necessary. I have never picked up over 5 max mana and I don't think more would help you. It's static regen that's more important. Although note that it's because I try to keep spell mana costs low because Terra likes to burst through her decks rather than slowly dump spells, even if they are 0-2 mana cost spells.

The point of taking mana regen on Terra is because when no tiles are cracked on the field, such as at the start or after flat earth is cast, Terra struggles to simultaneously dump spells and break tiles with her main weapon.

• Giant armor [a] (+10 def, -.3 mana/s) If you believe you can handle the hit to your mana regeneration, this can be an acceptable card. (Your mana regeneration can go negative. It was not fun when I found that out.)
  
• Masonjar [a] (Apply fragile to enemies when you <1 mana) Terra has many, many moments where she runs below 1 mana.
  
• Power Shard [a] (+10 damage when doing 40>= dmg) If you have the fragile upgrade to exav or high spell power this will help add lots of damage.
  
• Thorn (Gain 5 spell power, shield decays) I would personally not take this if I have or will have flat earth, however, it would increase your damage dramatically. If you are good at cycling your deck very quickly though, thorn will not hurt as much because you will constantly refill your shield through flat earth.
  
• Double Edge (+4 spell power, -4 defense) risky but helpful.

Once again, in my view, Terra is not a flow deck because flow really gets topped off by 3-4 mana cards such as rock tomb or coldstone which may require precision. Rock tomb is like trisect or ragnarok for trinity. While I might be proven wrong in the future, I simply avoid discussing integrating flow in this guide and I will let you decide if you want her deck to flow at all.

This is a collection of random notes. There isn't much content

Bosses tend to run around quite often, and that makes boxing them in difficult.
Terra's real bossing strength comes from being able to fence them in, although this is more or less effective depending on what boss you fight.

One way of starting the boxing process is to cut the right side of the board in half, vertically or horizontally. And then you can cut that box in half, boxing them in even more.

Bosses such as Shiso are on the harder end. He teleports.

Hazel: You can outright cancel her missile column and turret summons by cracking the tiles which they will spawn on ahead of time. This takes a tiny bit of practice. Tier 4+ Hazel offers the greatest challenge when you let her put four turrets on the top row of the map. You can't kill those turrets once it happens. If you are going to fight 4+ hazel but have nothing, you can consider picking up tile fire despite how dangerous that card is without wings [a]. Hazel should be the least challenging.

Icy b*tch: Form the maginot line. Keep column #5 cracked and she'll be unable to do the moving dash.

Gunner: Many of his up-and-down attacks are outright prevented with good cracks. Just keep your eye on blinking tiles to prevent resets. If tiles reset, he will teleport to wherever he was supposed to be. But he doesn't walk past broken tiles WHILE they're broken.

Violette: She will never put music notes on top of broken tiles. You can completely prevent her speakers from spawning if you crack them quickly enough.

ON BOSS MOVEMENTS
When bosses teleport and when they move is two different things. When they teleport, they will teleport past broken tiles. When they move, you can block them. However, when bosses start their sequenced moving attacks, such as level 4+ icy's non-teleporting advancing dash (she dashes from right to left, tile by tile), or gunner's up and down sweep, the way that they work is weird. They get blocked by broken tiles, but if there are no tiles broken in the way, they will teleport to where they meant to attack. For example: If you block 2 of icy b*tch's advancing dashes and then the broken tiles reset, her last few dashes will hit deep into your side of the board where they were originally supposed to go, as if you never cracked any tiles. She doesn't just resume dashing left right where you blocked her. And similarly, for gunner's up-and-down row attacks, if he starts on the bottom row and gets blocked for an attack or two then the tiles reset, he will just jump to whatever row he was supposed to be in instead of walking up one-by-one.

The Gate: Ha ha. Finally, a real test of how good you really are at cycling this deck!


ON ENEMIES
You can stop the 3D-printer enemy (the one that spawns the small blue cube enemies) from producing any units at all by breaking adjacent tiles to it.