It’s not every day you see Akiri, Fearless Voyager at the PDH table, let alone winning at a major tournament. It’s even rarer that the pilot is someone as thoughtful—and frankly, hilarious—as SouthLakes.
Last Saturday, the Common Cause X tournament wrapped up with a bit of a surprise ending. South (as we’ll call him) managed to squeak into the Top 4 with a 1-1-1 record. He didn’t dominate the Swiss rounds, but once he hit the elimination bracket, he took the winning position in the finals.
I caught up with him afterward to talk about the win, his unique Akiri list, and, inevitably, a bunch of other stuff we didn’t plan on discussing.
The Deck: “A Sandbox in Boros”
I had to ask him: Why Akiri? And specifically, is this a new brew?
South explained that he’s been tinkering with this list since the summer of 2025. He sees Akiri as a deceptively powerful engine that people are sleeping on.
“It’s a deck that does a lot of things,” he told me. He compared it to Raff, Weatherlight Stalwart—another commander that demands you meet a specific condition (in Raff’s case, casting spells; in Akiri’s, attacking with equipped creatures) to unlock a massive advantage. “Once you fulfill the kind of central condition in both decks, you have a huge amount of flexibility… It’s kind of just a sandbox. You can plug and play as you see fit.”
The core appeal is simple: card draw in colors that usually hate you - South’s words, not mine. “Whenever you attack a player with one or more equipped creatures, draw a card,” he recited, noting you can do this up to three times a turn. But the real spice is the combo.
South’s list runs a unique “two-card combo” involving Guilty Conscience effects and creatures like Frilled Deathspitter. You put Guilty Conscience on the Spitter, deal damage, and the enchantment triggers damage back to the Spitter, which triggers damage to an opponent, looping infinitely. Usually this would kill the creature splashing damage after a few iterations, but Akiri allows you to give these creatures indestructible, continuing the loop perpetually.
“The real selling point for this list is that it’s one of the few lists in the format which has access to a unique two-card combo… and it is its own outlet,” he explained. And because he’s playing Akiri, he has access to Martyrdom, a card he surprisingly loves. “Martyrdom… lets you redirect any amount of damage for the rest of the turn to a given creature.” It’s redundancy that doubles as protection.
He admitted the deck runs “a lot of trash, horrible draft chaff,” citing cards from the Avatar and Assassin’s Creed sets. But that’s the beauty of it. “It’s nice to sit down at a table and feel like you have levers to pull in each situation.”
Creator vs. Fixer
I asked him about his day job, and it turns out South works in tech, debugging operating systems. He made a really poignant comparison between his work and his hobby. In his job, he’s mostly fixing things that are broken. Magic gives him a space to actually build.
“I think for me it was always the case that I [want] to be taken seriously as a kind of creative,” he admitted. “And then you move into being an engineer because that’s where the money is. And it gets harder and harder to be creative because so much of the time is spent fixing stuff.”
Magic is that outlet. It’s a place where he can say, “Look how cool this thing is. I made this thing.” Even if, as he joked, the only way to get people to look at your creation is to win a tournament with it.
Bringing Humor to the Game
Toward the end, we were just riffing on the community. South has a great sense of humor about the tension in competitive games. He told me a story about a player running an Alexios deck who, in the middle of a game-winning turn for someone else, was just picking his teeth and muttering about getting food stuck.
“I was crying laughing,” South said. “It was so absurd at that moment for someone to be like… ‘Oh, I’ve got meat in my teeth,’ while someone else is trying to win the game. I love breaking the tension.”
It’s that attitude that makes him such a great part of the scene. He wants people to be braver with their deck building. “I want everyone to sit down and think they have a chance of winning,” he said. “We should aspire to get to a point where everybody can sit on the table and expect to do something interesting.”
SouthLakes certainly did something interesting last weekend. He took a Boros deck, filled it with “draft chaff,” and walked away with the trophy.
If you want to see how he did it, or try your hand at the next one, check out the links below. The tournament was hosted on topdeck.gg, which is where you’ll find more events coming up soon.
Links
Common Cause X Event Page & Bracket
SouthLakes’ Winning Akiri Decklist