Meeting the GO – Gallon
The Hearthstone Winter playoffs will be held on January, 19th for Americas and on January, 12th for Europe. Edward “Gallon” Goodwin, professional Hearthstone player for GamersOrigin, is qualified for one of the last major events prior to the World Championship
GamersOrigin is Gallon’s first team ever since his beginning in Hearthstone in 2015.
I reached legend pretty quickly after I first started playing Hearthstone in 2015. I thought this meant I was one of the best players so I started entering open tournaments and I qualified for the Spring 2016 playoffs. Even though I did reasonably well at that playoffs, it was a huge wake-up call for me. There was a lot of things I was doing wrong and many ways I could improve.
I spent the next year and a half trying to fix both the mistakes I was making and my attitude towards the game in general, until a point where I thought my level of play was much closer to other good players.
I was approached by a couple teams in 2017 but didn’t take any offers until Purple asked me to join GamersOrigin for the 2018 season. I got a chance to meet Purple through several voice calls with a group of players and really liked the way he thought about and approached the game, so I gladly joined his team, hoping to learn from him and also to get good results for GamersOrigin.
The 2018 season was a great one for the American player, who qualified for the Summer playoffs and achieved good results in Tour Stops, including a Top 4 at Montreal. He was nominated for the Hearthstone Global Games to represent team USA and obtained many victories alongside with Den and Trec in team tournaments. Gallon is also qualified for the WESG finals, which will be held in China in March 2019.
I don’t know if I have a special way to train, but I do try to be as comfortable as possible with the decks I bring to any tournament. It’s really important to know the ins and outs of certain matchups because there are often unintuitive decisions in certain matchups that will greatly increase your win rate. If you haven’t seen those come up before, it is quite difficult to make the correct play in the heat of the moment. The more you practice outside of the tournament, the less stressful the matches will be.
Gallon is also known for his passion for King Mukla, a card he is used to bring at every tournament.
Currently, my favourite card is King Mukla, but that is only because Coldlight Oracle rotated out from standard. Before the nerf to Level Up, Odd Paladin was a common tournament deck that people often tried to beat. The usual gameplan for Odd Paladin was to make a wide board of small minions, so decks trying to beat Paladin would look for cheap board clears.
King Mukla is the exact opposite strategy: instead of a lot of small minions, it’s one huge minion, so you could blow a lot of the decks trying to beat you out of the water. Odd Paladin is a lot weaker now though, so it may be time to find a new favourite card!
I have a couple very important events coming up: Winter Playoffs in January, and the WESG finals in March. I really hope I do well at Playoffs, because if I get top 4 there I keep the dream of reaching the World Championship alive.
WESG is also very important because the prize pool is one of the highest for any tournament besides Worlds. After that, it isn’t clear yet what the format for Hearthstone will be, so we will have to wait a bit longer to see how 2019 will shape up. No matter what it is, I will do my best to represent GO in Hearthstone #GOWIN!
