hs esports

In-client asynchronous tournament mode.
When you click the little button that says ranked/casual, there's a third option - tournament. Let's assume standard ladder for now.
About 3 weeks after the set comes out, the weekly tournament ladder opens. This is a Monday to Sunday 7-day period with fixed decks and a win counter up to 100 games. The first time you click the tournament mode button per week, the button doesn't say "play" but it says "select deck". It could also use the heroic tavern brawl interface if we'd rather. Once you click the deck, it says "this is your deck for the entire week" etc etc - pop up indicating you're locked in. From there, a little win counter appears where your rank would normally be in the top right and starts at 0-0.
This is a *completely separate ladder* with pairings generally based on your winrate. It counts the first 100 games. Each weekly tournament ladder qualifies players for a pre-scheduled qualifier the following week that would almost always be on Saturday but could be on some Sundays. But like I said, pre-scheduled - if you queue up on Monday you should know what your commitment should be the following Saturday. The current weekly leaderboards could be on the website or we could just list the record cutoff. These tournaments cut to top 256.
These players are randomly seeded and then play a tournament of whatever format you want. I would prefer to not use battlefy for an external bracket, but I assume that would happen. Whatever. Top *8* of this tournament qualify on all three servers - four if China allows it or a similar system. We'd leave 64 slots for China qualifiers.
Run these in-client ladder systems for 8 total weeks. 8 weeks, 8 players, 4 servers = 256 players.
In addition, have monthly grand prix events - Dreamhacks or the equivalent. Top 8 qualify. 3*8 = 24, we're up to 280.
Top 32 from previous masters tour qualify. Up to 312. would love if qualifying paid out $1k usd for travel but i recognize that's unlikely.
The masters tours take place two weeks after a set release and the decklist deadline is the week after the set releases.

Give some kind of points to track performance in the masters tour events and some kind of points for GPs, much like HCT points and any other game that has also used points. At the end of the year - not at Blizzcon unfortunately, but in March like a month before the set rotates, have a World Championship that's also a send off of the previous year of hearthstone. Invite:
3 masters tour winners
4 highest point totals in the 4 regions (again, China can do its own thing for its slot here but should get its slot)
the top 4 players by winrate for the tournament ladder qualifiers - basically, who were the "tournament mode sharks" - one per region
the top 5 at large point holders after the above 11 qualifications

16 players fighting for the trophy using the year's solved format. and this tournament is once a year so it can also be a very different format than the regular masters tour - even if you stick with battlefy/specialist/etc for the masters tours, worlds could be conquest, lhs, the wsoe format, whatever.

for in between content between masters tours and worlds - beyond video coverage of the dreamhack/gps, partner with streamers who are doing the tournament grind. pick a person per day per region to watch every week, and whoever qualifies, have them record or stream their tournament if they want. interview them, have them do vlogs, do "life of a grinder" segments, and have your own players make your content. pay them a little.

you may notice there is no mention of hs grandmasters here. scrap it. it doesn't work. if you want to have reward levels based on point totals or some other metric, you can. not necessary, though i do think it would be nice to pay for travel somehow.