Currently in the middle of setting up a world that I plan on writing stories in. I was curious of the general opinion of using classic races like elves, dwarves, orcs etc.

Currently right now the closest I have are the Syvlan which are a species of sentiment plant people who are born from a great tree. This tree had sucked in all the elven souls when their people went extinct a few millenia ago and rebirth the souls in a constant cycle of reincarnation.

Straight up carbon copying another person's work seemed lazy to me. So instead I tried to make them more interesting than just perfect tree hippies.

The rest of my races are more natural, being "animal people" who evolved intelligence similar to humans. Not super original either obviously but I liked that I actually had to put work into thinking about their morphology and evolutiom. I also like how inhuman most of them are.

What're your opinions on using a race like elves, dwarves, orcs etc.