That’s the thing. Humans is a good deck but it doesn’t stand out. Most of the time the top deck is something exemplary or has certain particularly good matchups that are relatively common. That’s not the case for Humans and I find that very weird.

It is a possibility that people are picking up humans more for the hype of it being the best than anything else. It was well-represented at the pro tour, which gave it a ton of publicity, and had had similar numbers at recent grand prix.

I think part of it, though, is that while it isn’t the best at anything, it has no giant flaws in the current meta. It isn’t vulnerable to hate like affinity. It isn’t the most disruptive, the fastest, or the most resilient, but it is basically a B+ deck across the board in these categories. AND it doesn’t have an awful ramp matchup like jund or mardu midrange because of its clock and better-aligned disruption (we’ve all seen Tron lose because a land had to enter tapped by now, or Ugin became a nine-cost card).

2: Deck mutability is also a factor that has to be counted into the equation.
Affinity is an artisfact deck, it needs artisfacts and it’s succes is limited to what artisfacts are playable at the moment. A mono White deck is largely consisting of white cards.
Humans as a deck is able to use the full colorpalette, but is bound by playing with the creaturetype “human”. Humans as a deck seems to have a large enough cardpool to be able to adapt towards what is played in the meta. Other 2-3 colored decks seems to be very adaptive as well, but few decks run 5 colors. This might be why humans can hang on.

3: What decks are holding back the decks that clearly beat humans?
For humans to be dethroned, the decks able to beat the deck must be able to meet it.
Humans it at the moment played by 10% of the meta, so your odds of running into it will be 1 out of 10 players, which means you will be much more likely to meet something else.
The current meta is wild, with more than 50 active archetypes, and that means your deck is unikely to meet what you most want to. Since most players design their decks to beat the topdecks the bottomfeeders of the meta are really what stops these plans. So the answer will be very unclear as long as we have a wide meta with no decks being played at more than 10% of the field. During times where the best decks in the meta was running 13-14%the field was a lot more narrow and much clearer.

I did think of one possible reason, though. Many of the Humans pilots I’ve been facing online have seemed pretty inexperienced and new to the format. Perhaps Humans for some reason is a popular choice among players new to the format? Because my win rate against Humans has always seemed to be quite high no matter what deck I’m playing.