Thanks for your detailed answer! It's great to disagree, especially since Splinterlands leaves room for different approaches. We aren't that far with 2/5 choices in common and wanted to add two things:

1. Fire melee is an already strong archetype but is countered by armor stacking and Mylord. I expect him to be still to be meta and great for fights under 16 or with some rulesets. At 16-17, a Llama + Flesh golem, Kron or even Pelacor Merc or a new card like Grund is a deadly setup and Obsidian can't really compete. It leaves probably a place for Obsidian on fights with a high mana limit. Alric is a strong card because - as you mentioned - Water doesn't have as much Splinters options as Earth if you exclude Valnamor and he was rare enough to not meet him that often. We'll see soon how the matchup Mylord + Llama vs Obsidian is.
2. Formats won't be splitted immediatly and the impacts on other competitive game modes (brawls + tournaments) is unclear atm. You can make very different rankings depending on the restrictions.