AnKing Deck Alternative: AI-Generated USMLE Flashcards From Your Own Notes

AnKing v12 ships with roughly 35,000 cards. If you do the math at a reasonable 200-300 reviews per day at full maturity, that is something like 60 to 90 days of pure review time before the deck stabilizes, ignoring the new cards you have to introduce along the way.

That number is the reason "anking alternative" is a search students type at 1am during M2. They opened the deck late, they have their own lecture notes, or their school's curriculum does not map cleanly to First Aid, and the standard "just mature AnKing" advice no longer fits.

This post is for those students. Not a hit piece on AnKing - it is genuinely the best community deck that exists - but an honest look at when a 35K premade deck is the wrong tool, and what to do instead.

What AnKing is, briefly

AnKing is the consolidated community deck for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK. It started as a merge of Lightyear, Lolnotacop, Zanki, and Pepper, then got cleaned up, retagged, and shipped as a single living deck with a team maintaining it across versions.

Most of the cards are cloze deletions of First Aid facts, with extra coverage from Boards and Beyond, Pathoma, Sketchy, UWorld, and Amboss. Tags map to FA chapters and to the resources above, so you can suspend everything except what you covered this week.

It is the standard for a reason. The card phrasing is tight, the community has surfaced edge cases over a decade, and there is a mature ecosystem of tagging tools, add-ons, and shared workflows built around it.

The honest critique

Three things to be straight about.

Maturity timelines are brutal. Mature means the card has graduated to long intervals - you only see it every few weeks. To get there, you have to do the card multiple times across rising intervals. With 35K cards, even unsuspending only the "high-yield" subset still leaves you with 8K-15K cards depending on tags, and that is a real wall if you start past the optimal window.

Bloat is real. Some cards are 12 years old. Some test minutiae that has not been on a Step exam since 2017. Some are duplicates that survived the merge. The maintainers prune aggressively, but a deck this size cannot help carrying some dead weight.

Version updates create friction. When v13 ships, cards you suspended can get unsuspended (because tag schemas changed), card content can shift, and your scheduling history sometimes loses fidelity through the update path. The official migration scripts are good, but they are not magic.

None of this is a reason to abandon AnKing. It is a reason to be honest about who the deck is built for: a student who started in M1, kept up daily, and has time to mature it before dedicated.

Why students search for "AnKing alternative"

The four most common situations.

You started M2 with no cards reviewed. You meant to start in M1, you did not, and now you have 12 months until dedicated. Maturing 35K cards in 12 months while also doing UWorld, NBMEs, and your shelf rotations is not a real plan.

You have your own M1 lecture notes and want cards from those. Your school's pathology block ran for 9 weeks and your professor emphasized 8 topics that are barely in First Aid. AnKing covers FA. It does not cover Dr. Whoever's slide deck on her own research interest that will absolutely be on the shelf.

You are a non-trad or second-degree student. Your curriculum is integrated, organ-system based, or accelerated, and the assumption that everyone is doing Bros + Sketchy + Pathoma + FA in parallel does not match your day. You need cards aligned to your lectures, not to a resource bundle.

You want image-occlusion of your own slides. AnKing has occlusion cards for FA images and some Sketchy scenes. It does not have occlusion of your school's anatomy lab photos, your histo professor's slides, or your cardio attending's ECG of the week.

If you are in any of those four buckets, "just mature AnKing" is bad advice. You need a way to make cards from your own material, fast.

The AI alternative: cards from your uploads

The other path is to generate flashcards directly from your notes, lecture slides, PDFs, or textbook chapters. Upload the material, get back cloze and Q&A cards you can review in the same active recall workflow.

Scholarly's flashcards feature does this. You drop in a lecture PDF, a Powerpoint, a First Aid section, or your own handwritten notes, and you get back a deck of cards generated from that material. PDF to flashcards handles textbook chapters and scanned notes. The cloze deletion generator handles the AnKing-style {{c1::blanks}} you are used to.

The cards export to Anki as a .apkg file with cloze and basic note types, so they slot into your existing review flow alongside AnKing. Nothing about your AnKing setup has to change.

The "use both" workflow

This is what most people who try AI cards actually settle on. Not a replacement for AnKing, a supplement.

1. Keep AnKing as your high-yield FA backbone. Unsuspend the subset that matches what you are currently covering. Do those reviews daily.
2. Generate AI cards from your school's lectures. For every week of class, upload the slide deck or your notes, generate 30-80 cards, and add them to a separate "School" deck inside Anki.
3. Generate AI cards from your weak areas. When you bomb a UWorld block on renal acid-base, upload the explanations or the relevant FA section and generate targeted cards on the specific gaps.
4. Generate AI cards from board prep resources your school emphasizes that AnKing does not cover. Some schools push Costanzo physio, some push BRS path - AnKing's coverage of these is incomplete by design.

The split is roughly: AnKing for the universal high-yield, AI cards for everything your specific curriculum needs that AnKing does not cover. You end up with one fewer source of FOMO, because the gaps in AnKing are filled by your own material instead of a vague feeling that you are missing something.

Comparison: AnKing vs Brosencephalon vs Lightyear vs AI-generated

Deck	Cards	Best for	Friction
AnKing v12	~35,000	Students who start M1, follow FA + Bros/B&B closely	Maturity timeline, bloat, version updates
Brosencephalon (legacy)	~17,000	Historical reference, still loved by some	No longer maintained, missing recent resources
Lightyear	~25,000	Boards and Beyond-aligned learners	Lower coverage of Step 2 material
AI-generated (Scholarly)	As many as you need from your own material	M2 starters, non-trads, lecture-heavy schools	Cards are personalized; no community-vetted tag tree

The AI-generated row is the column that does not exist anywhere else: cards built specifically from your material, in any quantity, with no maturity backlog because the deck did not exist before you uploaded.

Where AnKing still wins

Be honest with yourself.

Community-vetted high-yield tags. A decade of medical students has marked which cards predict UWorld and NBME performance. The "AnKing_Net" tag, the "high_yield" subtag, the resource crosswalks - that institutional memory does not exist for any new deck.

Mature shared workflows. AnKi Hub, AnKing's official updates, AnkiConnect-based add-ons, the cloze-one-by-one and pass/fail workflows - all built around the standard tag schema.

Brosencephalon-era depth on classic topics. Some of those cards are 8 years old and still beat anything generated today on the genetics and embryo content, because they have been refined by thousands of medical students suggesting edits.

If you are an M1 with 18+ months until dedicated, AnKing is still the right backbone. The argument here is not "switch off AnKing" - it is "supplement AnKing with your own material" or "use AI cards if AnKing was never going to fit your timeline."

Where AI cards win

Personalization. Your school's slides, your attending's pet topics, your weak areas. A community deck cannot know those things.

Speed. A lecture goes from PDF to 60-card deck in under a minute. No tagging marathon, no waiting for the maintainers to update, no SuperMemo-fu.

No maturity backlog. A deck of 200 cards from this week's lecture does not have a 60-day on-ramp. You start reviewing today, the cards are mature in a few weeks, done.

Coverage of your lecture's quirks. The 8 topics your professor emphasized that are barely in First Aid. The ECG patterns your cardio attending tested in clinic. The drug names your pharm professor invented mnemonics for. AnKing cannot cover those because they are local.

A note on Anki itself

If you are reading this and have not yet committed to Anki as the review engine, both AnKing and AI-generated cards live inside Anki. The scheduler (SM-2 historically, now FSRS by default in modern Anki) does not care where the cards came from. Cards exported from Scholarly use cloze and basic note types that Anki recognizes natively, and you can FSRS-tune them the same way you tune AnKing.

You do not have to pick a flashcard ecosystem. You pick a card source.

FAQ

How does cloze quality compare to AnKing? AnKing cards have been hand-edited for a decade and the phrasing is tight. AI-generated cloze quality has gotten close on factual recall (definitions, mechanisms, drug side effects, classic associations) - close enough that students who blind-test them rate them similarly on usefulness. AnKing still wins on the elegant single-cloze cards that test exactly one concept with no extraneous wording. The honest answer: AnKing wins on craft, AI wins on coverage of your specific material.

Does Scholarly support FSRS? The cards export as standard Anki .apkg files. Once they are in your Anki collection, FSRS handles them like any other deck. There is no special "Scholarly card type" that breaks FSRS scheduling.

Can I export to Anki? Yes. Cards generated in Scholarly export as .apkg with cloze and basic note types preserved. Import into Anki, drop them in any deck, review as normal. Tags you set in Scholarly are preserved on export.

Does it do image occlusion? Yes, image occlusion is supported for uploaded slides, lecture screenshots, anatomy images, and diagrams. The occlusions export as standard Anki image-occlusion cards (compatible with the official image-occlusion add-on), so they review in Anki the same way AnKing's FA occlusions do.

Can I import AnKing tags into the AI cards? You can tag your AI-generated cards with the same tag schema AnKing uses (#AK_Step1_v12::...) so they sort into the same browser tree. The AI does not currently auto-tag with the AnKing schema - you apply tags manually or with Anki's batch-tag tool. Most students who use both keep a separate top-level tag like #school::cardio::week3 for their AI cards and leave AnKing tags untouched.

How long does setup take? First card: about 90 seconds from upload to first review (account, upload one PDF, generate, click into review). First full lecture deck: 2-3 minutes. There is no maturity wait, no add-on installation, no tag schema to learn. Compared to setting up AnKing for the first time - downloading the deck, installing AnkiHub, configuring suspended-by-default, learning the tag tree - it is meaningfully faster to first card.

What to do this week

If you are an M1 with time, start AnKing the normal way and add AI cards from your lectures alongside it.

If you are an M2 who never started AnKing and dedicated is approaching, generate AI cards from First Aid plus your own weak-area material, skip the 35K maturity wall, and use AnKing's free high-yield subset only for the topics where community-vetted phrasing matters most.

If you are a non-trad or in an integrated curriculum, lean heavier on AI cards from your own lectures, use AnKing as a reference deck rather than a daily review deck, and keep the focus on the material your school actually tests.

The point is not that AnKing is wrong. The point is that "mature AnKing" is one strategy, not the only strategy, and for a lot of students in 2026, it is no longer the right one.