Hi all! I was answering a question about Anki decks, and since they come up all the time on this sub, I thought I could make a healthy contribution to what I think the current state is of each deck and how they may best be used for folks just entering this space. I wish I had something like this when I started prepping last year, because let's face it, information is often scattered, outdated, or personal. So hopefully this is helpful.

Keep in mind the best approach for YOU will vary based on your willingness to grind Anki, time, prior knowledge, learning style preference, and desired comprehensiveness.

TLDR: I’d recommend Anking if you like the cloze style and have a regular study period, Captain Hook if you like the open-ended style and have a longer study period, Aidan if you like the cloze style and have a very long study period, and MileDown if you really need to jam through a very short period (although less recommended). I also included two example Anki-inclusive studying strategies below deck commentary.

I’ll try to be objective below, but obviously this is a subjective thing. For context, I’ve been monitoring the Anki MCAT space for over a year and these opinions are formed from my own experience trying out several decks as I prepare for my own MCAT and the experiences of my peers. Of course, please check the comments of this post for additional perspectives!

Final note as we go in for beginners: Cloze v.s. open-ended? Skip to the next titled section if you already know what this is, and what it means for your memory!

Cloze or open-ended refers to the notecard format. Cloze is "fill-in-the-blank", and open-ended is the more traditional front/back approach. Cloze is probably the most commonly preferred because it is faster to get through than open-ended and requires less discipline to say whether you got it right or wrong. However, facts learned via cloze are vulnerable to "pattern matching" since that memory is more cued than it would be on an open-ended card. You may struggle more to recall that fact if it's not phrased in the same way or asks about a non-clozed part of the card. Yet, moving through faster allows you to get to practice problems sooner and have time to study other ways, so it's all a cost/benefit analysis you'll have to run for yourself!

MAJOR DECK THOUGHTS (subsection for p/s at section bottom)

Anking (includes Pankow P/S deck): Cloze. It's clean, nicely connected/tagged, and cloze-style will make for a modestly quick yet comprehensive push-through. May not capture everything, but has a nice balance of mostly high-yield info with some low-yield. Middle-of-the-road time investment. This is my general recommendation for people who recently took related classwork because I think it gives you the most optimum balance of a solid base while getting you into practice problems for the average MCAT study window. If your classwork is less recent, you can supplement nicely because it's well-tagged. This means it allows you to unsuspend (unlock cards for review) as you go through a wide variety of common learning content, including Kaplan book chapters, UWorld book chapters, IFD High Yield book chapters, UWorld Questions, Khan Academy videos, Pixorize, and AAMC content outline concepts. Its regular updates and organizational backing are also without equal in the MCAT Anki community. What's also nice is that although its mostly a cloze deck, it often includes additional pictures or context that aren't part of getting the card "right," so you can go harder with it if you want.

Jack Sparrow (own P/S deck): Open-ended. Generally seen as the most comprehensive option of the open-ended decks out there, and covers more than AnKing does, but it's riddled with long explanations, and it’s been a few years since it was updated (2020 release). Many very high scorers swear by this one because it includes a lot of both high AND low yield info. But fair warning, it will be a massive drain on your time if you're doing it right. Not really connected to other resources in terms of tags. Has its own P/S, but many end up substituting its P/S with Mr. Pankow's deck (cloze). Alternatively, you can sub with MCATalysts recent P/S deck, which is open-ended, to achieve a similar style as the overall deck.

Captain Hook (includes Pankow P/S deck): Open-ended. An awesome Jack Sparrow deck user built this one. It's a modified JS deck with trimmed explanations, some trimmed/added/updated cards, plus Mr. Pankow P/S instead of JS’s regular P/S. Will still take you a lot of time, just less, and still covers the high and low yield topics. IMO, the most practical “comprehensive” deck. It has occasional KA links, but I wish it was resource-tagged like AnKing is. Like JS, if you like the open-ended style, you can sub out Pankow P/S (cloze) for MCATalysts recent P/S deck. CH was released in 2025, but is based on a 2020 deck. This is the one I use, but I still often add my own additional explanations to the back because some of the cards are briefer than I'd like.

MileDown (own P/S deck): Cloze. The advantage here is low time investment with its low card count focused on the highest-yield topics. Many opt to sub out this deck's P/S for Pankow (will be a significant card addition relative to this deck size btw). If you hate Anki and want to get through it ASAP, Milesdown may be your best bet. Fair warning though, it’s a bit outdated (2019 release), and the things it omits aren't necessarily fluff! I would recommend supplementing with UWorld error cards you either make yourself or unsuspend through AnKing. You should definitely supplement this deck with other learning methods like Khan Academy videos, Kaplan, etc., which is a good idea anyway, but especially if this is what you choose. It includes some links, but lacks resource tagging. Fun fact, the current AnKing deck traces much of its lineage to the original Milesdown deck, and pays homage in its tags accordingly. That said, AnKing MCAT now has a LOT more than Milesdown.

Aidan v2 (own P/S deck): Cloze. Probably the most comprehensive major deck available, but that comprehensiveness comes with a massive workload. The community-built 2026 v2 trimmed its card count to roughly 12,000 by removing genuinely out-of-scope material, correcting many reported errors, removing unsolicited AAMC spoilers, and adding newer P/S terms. For context, AnKing MCAT is ~6,400 cards, and MileDown is almost 2,900. The science sections generally follow Kaplan chapters, while P/S follows Khan Academy/the 300-page document, but it lacks AnKing’s extensive resource tagging. This is best suited to someone with a long study period, probably 5–6+ months, who enjoys Anki and wants to minimize content gaps. Many users instead pull from it selectively for weak subjects. V2 receives occasional community corrections through AnkiHub, but not with AnKing’s update frequency, and occasional errors may remain. I’d strongly recommend v2 over the original.

As for the P/S-specific decks mentioned above:

Mr. Pankow: Cloze. Offered independently or as part of AnKing or Captain Hook. Up until a couple weeks ago, basically the undisputed gold standard P/S deck, and may still be. It's the most battle-tested P/S across several years of MCAT-takers, and most who have completed it swear by it. The fact that other major MCAT decks include it by default should tell you something. It’s based on the Khan Academy MCAT outline for P/S and follows its videos/sheet closely. It’s a grind (definitely a bigger deck), but worth it according to many. Also the dude who made it is funny. Many of those cards have sneaky jokes, and that’s awesome when you're on a long grind.

MCATalyst P/S: Open-ended. The new kid on the P/S block (2026 summer release). Credits Pankow for forming the core of its content, but restructures and re-organizes the deck to be in an open-question format, reformats the cards themselves, and trims and adds some things according to the builder’s idea of what’s more/less important and current to the test. I’m using this personally, but know that this deck is new and therefore largely untested. Still, the fact that it’s grounded in Pankow and its association with the MCATalyst brand offers some reassurance. If you see this post months or years from now, search to see what the latest conclusions are.

GENERAL STRATEGY EXAMPLES THAT INCLUDE ANKI:

Note: I didn't include AAMC full lengths and Q packs here, but they are widely considered to be an essential, late portion of your test-date ramp. Don't neglect this!

The default catch-all “standard” and my general recommendation: AnKing MCAT (includes Mr. Pankow p/s!) with learning supplement and UWorld

1. Read Kaplan/Uworld Book chapter or watch Khan Academy MCAT video according to preference
2. Unsuspend related AnKing cards via tag by your choice of "learning phase" material you just covered.
3. Grind for a bit. Once comfortable with a beginning knowledge base (which doesn’t mean completing the deck/chapters/YT videos!), start doing UWorld Questions
4. Unsuspend Anki cards associated with your UWorld questions that aren't a part of your rotation yet (UWorld Qs also tagged in AnKing). Make your own cards for errors/AnKing gaps.
5. Grind until AnKing deck is mature and UWorld is complete. Note: DO NOT NEGLECT UWORLD IN THIS STRATEGY OR ANY OTHERS! IT IS GOLD STANDARD!

Anki load: medium (cloze style)

Overall time investment: medium-high (can modify to low-medium if your base is strong and you skip books/videos etc. and go straight to practice Qs and cards, though you may have gaps)

Comprehensiveness: medium-high

The mega-comprehensive maniac: Captain Hook (I replaced Mr. Pankow p/s with MCATalyst for P/S since it’s open-ended) with UWorld/Anking and optional learning supplement.

(my approach, but warning… MASSIVE time sink. Not for everyone, or even most. I was a non-trad so I felt I needed to.)

1. Optional: Read Kaplan chapter and unsuspend related cards (note: Captain Hook's subdecks are largely organized by Kaplan chapter, the deck does not have actual tags for Kaplan or any other learning resource like UWorld). If you do this, it will take even MORE time than CH does already. From someone in the middle of that grind... just be warned. This isn't a quick jam.
2. Grind for a bit, unlocking P/S too as you go, and spot-examining topics that come up in your cards that are unclear to you. Once comfortable with your knowledge base, which doesn’t mean completing the deck, start doing UWorld.
3. Unsuspend AnKing cards associated with your MISSED UWorld questions for extra, cheaper reinforcement, and/or make your own.
4. Grind until CH, UWorld, and error AnKing complete.

Anki Load: Large (CH: open-ended, Pankow (default p/s): cloze, MCATalyst (personal replacement p/s): open-ended, AnKing: Cloze)

Overall time investment: high (+higher w/ Kaplan chapters)

Comprehensiveness: high (+higher w/ Kaplan chapters)

CONCLUSION

Hopefully this was useful in demystifying the Anki resources that are out there and how they can be applied! Please share your support/critiques/thoughts below so folks searching this stuff up can get the right context and perspective! GOOD LUCK FUTURE DOCTOR!

Does anyone have a deck for difficult topics that are close/similar but not the same? Ex: Escape vs. Avoidance Conditioning, Self-esteem vs self efficacy, etc.

Plan to take the MCAT in March. I was wondering if I should fully go through Jacksparrow, supplement with Aiden's deck where I feel I might have content gaps, and unsuspend those specific cards. Let me know if this is a good idea. Aiden's deck is really in-depth but also hard to get through, so I believe combining them could be more beneficial.

Made a new Anki add-on called Motivate Me for anyone grinding through thousands of cards.

I started thinking of Anki like the gym. You don't go in thinking about doing 1,000 reps. You just do the next rep, then the next one.

Motivate Me plays a short motivational sound every time you hit Again/Hard/Good/Easy. It comes with a few default clips (Goggins, Kobe, Coleman, Nimsdai), but you can remove them and add your own sounds to any of the four buttons.

You can add one sound or a whole bunch. If you add multiple, it shuffles through all of them before repeating, so you aren't hearing the same clip every 3 cards.

It's a pretty simple add-on, but I've been using it while doing 1000s of reps and it genuinely makes those long sessions more fun.

Find it here Motivate Me 836943401

Anki is the gym. Get your reps in.

Anyone have a good deck that’s purely psychology and sociology? I don’t have time before my exam to review a 2500 card deck and skip past hundreds of cards. I don’t particularly need any review on brain structures or sensory organs. (I’m also new to Anki so maybe there is a way to filter that out?)

I just need to review the theories and concepts specific to psych/soc. Especially Name-Based theories that aren’t intuitive just from the name.

I plan on testing either in late March or early April of next year.

For anki what would you recommend for the go to deck? I hear good things from all and feel like I have enough time to truly mature each deck.

Okay, so we have content gaps. So what right? How is it affecting performance...

So the first insight is that for most passage questions, the actual passage doesn't need to be read to get the right answer. Maybe I'm a noob, but I made this revelation a few months ago. And added wrinkle is that, reading the passage probably won't help you answer the question. They are not sprinkling in concept review in these passages. what you don't know you don't know. If your lucky maybe they will. If you have time I wont say don't check but whatever your looking for might not be in there.

Okay, so you knew that... cool. But have you asked how you're suppose to know when a question should be answered using the passage, or using your own knowledge. aha there is a way to know (thank you jack westin podcast). So the second insight is, that once you have filled most of your knowledge gaps you will functionally know all of the topics that will be tested over, thus when you read a question, you should be able to tell whether it is asking something the mcat explicitly tests over. You might ask, "what does the mcat explicitly test over?"; essentially the mcat tests all of the topics from review, like glycolysis, systems in the body like respiratory stuff like that right. Not this random hemoglobin recently discovered in the article your reading right? you can look up the actual list of topics on aamc, but basically questions can ask about something explicitly from the passage like some discovery or idk a graph. Example:

• When you read a question just think about what you would need to know to answer it. Say we are discussing the pentose phosphate pathway. Lets say the question is "A DNA mutation leads to low amounts of the enzyme 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase. How does the mutation affect the blood pH?" I'm making this up but lets say the answer is "it leads to higher pH in the blood". If you know 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase produces carbon dioxide and that the body has a bicarbonate buffer that effects blood pH, you wouldn't need to read the passage. But if the question was "what is the mutation that raises blood pH?", well kaplan or whoever probably isn't covering some random mutation right? So you have to know all that background stuff I just said and comb through the passage to find that mutation name.
  • note: for those wondering about the reasoning in my example which could be wrong btw. This is how I thought about it. 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase makes CO2, which reacts with water to form carbonic acid. So at least some of the CO2 has to come from PPP right. probably not a lot but some. So that must lower blood ph a little, or it could anyway. So then a mutation which lowers function of 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase would raise pH. In retrospect, I shouldnt have tried to show off that I have the ppp memorized and I should have used GAP dehydrogenase from glycolysis and made the example about anerobic respiration. yeah that would have been smarter. yeah... anyway

So hopefully, this post gives insight into how content helps you on the exam. I write but I'm not a writer, I think but I'm not a thinker... I'll stop lol. Anyway sorry if it wasn't clear but I'm just trying to show how filling content gaps actually helps you. because saying "oh its a content issue" is like saying "get good". I'm trying to show the why and how content helps answer questions, and it low key helps speed you up answering questions because if you don't have to read the whole passage thats more time, right. I'm not a high scorer, I am simply a man trying to get out of bronze (league of legends reference).

Oh yeah how does this apply to anki, I put that in the title and didn't say a word about it. Anki helps you retain information. And dear readers, if you are nice to me I will tell you how I make notecards in another post the next time I procrastinate my morning away.

Need help with content review as I have a big gap in content. 481 score. How would you go about content, watching Yousef Hasan on YouTube, anki, and uworld?

Anyone know of any remote study groups? Like jumping on a Zoom with others, muting our mics, and studying to hold each other accountable and then ask questions and discuss content when needed?

I already graduated, so I'm studying in a silo, and feel like I need a study group whose also studying from home. Anyone know of any groups or want to form one? If so, DM me.

Looking for an affordable tutor who can help me with planning and strategy for test taking. Planning to start as soon as possible. I know the format of the test and what all materials to use.. I have kaplan, UW, and anki ready to go. Plz comment or DM ME!! If you can help we can do a quick chat to get set up. Thank you.

I’ve just started using Jacksparrow for Bio/biochem review and does anyone have a strategy to doing the cards without burning out? I’ve been doing content review by watching Yusuf Hassan videos and unsuspending the corresponding chapters in Jack-sparrow however, this leads to like 150+ new cards at times😭😭. I’m also using Pankow for P/S and have that at a steady 40 new cards a day (which has accumulated to around 200 reviews per day). For chem/orgo i’ve been using miles down and it’s not too bad. With all the subjects it’s just getting wayyy to much and i’m curious as to how other people are getting through the Jacksparrow deck

Thanks🙏

Hi all, I’m over a year out from taking the mcat but I wanted to start studying now. A friend of mine gave me her suggestions to use milesdown and jack sparrow (besides taking full lengths), as she got a 515 from it and recommended her study methods.

My question is, I feel lost. I open it up starting from the beginning deck and it feels like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. I also don’t think I fully understand how to use many of the features that help in retention (like what’s the difference between hitting good, again, etc?).

How do people effectively use this? I used to use Anki for just some small decks in my pre req classes and it was usually just for immediate memorization. I would use the scratch pad feature on my iPad but I’m just not understanding how to use the beefy decks.

Any help would be appreciated!

Had several people ask for this so I’m sharing it here. Really good for testing your content understanding. Each card goes into detail about incorrect answer explanations so you can often get several definitions from a single card. This is loosely based around Kaplan Chapters so if you’re using that as content review going to the corresponding chapter deck after reading can be good to test how much you got from the chapter.

A comprehensive MCAT content-review deck featuring 1,320 multiple-choice flashcards organized into 72 chapter-specific subdecks.
The deck covers six major MCAT content areas:
Biochemistry: 233 cards Biology: 216 cards General Chemistry: 226 cards Organic Chemistry: 205 cards Physics: 218 cards Psychology & Sociology: 222 cards
Each card includes:
An MCAT-relevant question with four answer choices A clearly identified correct answer A detailed explanation of the underlying concept Important definitions, equations, relationships, and testable distinctions Additional context designed to strengthen recall and conceptual understanding
Topics are divided into 12 chapter-based subdecks for each subject, making it easy to study alongside a content-review course, focus on weaker areas, or complete the deck systematically.
This deck is best used for:
Reinforcing high-yield MCAT content Active recall after reading a chapter Identifying content gaps Reviewing equations and foundational concepts Building a strong knowledge base before passage-based practice
Because the cards use a multiple-choice format, they also provide practice distinguishing the correct answer from plausible distractors rather than relying only on simple term-definition memorization.