Quick: name the most common fantasy race in the genre.
Did you say Elves? Dwarves? Orcs? Goblins?
Wrong. It's the one so obvious that you don't even think about it: Humans.
Yes, given that most authors are humans, it makes sense that if we want a relatable character, we tend to imagine a human first. Indeed, it's even somewhat less common to tell fantasy stories from the perspective of non-human characters.
One could argue that the quintessential, genre-defining fantasy work, Lord of the Rings, does this, and I think that's a valid argument. But in Tolkien's mythos, the Hobbits who serve as protagonists to his grand tales (I'd argue Sam is closer to the real protagonist of LOTR than Frodo, but it applies in either case) are actually just an off-shoot of humanity - sharing common ancestors while Elves and Dwarves were created separately.
But Humans are everywhere. In RPGs and other fantasy games, humans usually don't have a lot of big strengths or weaknesses - their diversity and adaptability tend to be emphasized in more recent works (Mass Effect, while Sci-Fi, fits these tropes quite well.)
In Magic the Gathering, humans are probably the most common creature type. But it was not always this way.
A lot of things changed when I was in my senior year of High School. This was when Magic ditched their old card frames to use the new, sleeker ones that have since become just what Magic cards look like. The change came with Eighth Edition, which came out on Magic's tenth anniversary. If you're a more recent player, you probably know the old frames as these weird relics of an earlier era, but I'll tell you that for those of us who had been playing Magic those past ten (or nine in my case) years, this was mind-blowingly weird. The sleek contours and smooth text boxes felt weirdly sci-fi compared to the old stuff we had - like how Black cards used to have what looked like aged parchment for text boxes or Green had what looked like a plank of wood.
But the other strange thing was that all of a sudden, there were humans.
Now, humans have been around since Magic began, obviously, but they were always defined by their "class" creature type. Soldiers, Clerics, Knights, Wizards, Druids, Shamans, and the like were all just assumed to be human unless they were combined with a race like Elf. If you had any cards that let you determine creature types, you'd pick one of those rather than human.
But the designers felt, in retrospect, that that was weird. Humans are just as much a unified species as elves or goblins, so why not allow that?
In the next expansion block, Mirrodin, they leaned into this - even on a plane where everyone was partially metal, and thus much less conventionally human (or goblin, or elf.) Each color had a type of human - the Auriok for White, Sylvok for Green, Vulshok for Red, Moriok for Black, and Neurok for Blue.
It took them ten years, but they added humans to the game. They then had to start issuing errata on ten years' worth of cards to give them new creature types. This would happen again in the very next block when Kamigawa turned "Legendary" into a supertype (which had sort of already existed thanks to Legendary Lands, introduced in Legends along with Legendary creatures) as well as adding the keyword Defender to divorce creature type from any implicit rules (previously, Walls had been the only creatures with an implied Defender keyword. We got our first sentient, humanoid defenders in Kamigawa.)
What's interesting about this change is that it actually allowed them to do some interesting new things, flavor-wise.
Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, an unconventional four-set block (or twinned two-set block if you prefer) were twin worlds that, famously, did not have any humans in them.
Later, Innistrad, one of Magic's most popular settings and sets (and one I wish I had been playing during - I'd love to play a Werewolf deck) would go the opposite direction - a plane without other humanoid races, per se, but one in which humans were constantly threatened on all sides by Vampires, Werewolves, Spirits, and Zombies.
It's always an interesting question to ask in fantasy - one of the most popular tropes of the genre is the idea of other races that are not human, yet are similar enough to be relatable. But it is funny to me that when throwing together all of these fantastical beings, it's easy to forget that we're putting ourselves into the mix.
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