Premade Anki Decks vs Making Your Own: Which Saves More Time?
Choosing between downloading a deck like AnKing and building your own flashcards depends on your syllabus. Here is when to use each and how to bridge the gap.
Hello there! If you are staring at a massive shared deck on Reddit and wondering if you should just download it instead of typing out your own notes, you are asking the right question.
I am Daniel. I am a third year engineering science student at the University of Toronto. I work on Nebulearn, so I have a bias toward tools that automate card creation, but I have spent enough time in engineering science to know that the "premade vs custom" debate is usually where the semester is won or lost.
The short answer: if your exam is a standardized beast like the MCAT or a common language certification, download a premade deck. If your exam is based on a specific professor's lecture slides from last Tuesday, you have to make your own.
The logic of the premade deck
A premade deck is a massive shortcut if the material is stable. This is why medical students love the AnKing deck. Thousands of people have already vetted those cards, fixed the typos, and added high quality diagrams.
You should use a premade deck when:
- The curriculum is identical for everyone (USMLE, MCAT, JLPT).
- The deck has a high "community trust" rating.
- You have enough time to actually finish the deck before the test.
The danger of downloading a 10,000 card deck is that you did not do the "encoding" step. In cognitive science, encoding is the process of actually understanding the information before you try to memorize it. When you download a deck, you are skipping the understanding and going straight to the brute force.
When making your own cards is mandatory
Most university courses do not have a perfect Anki deck waiting for you on AnkiWeb. Professors change their slides every year. They emphasize different details. They might even test you on a specific case study they mentioned for five minutes in class.
If you try to use a generic biology deck for a specific "Molecular Genetics 300" course, you will likely memorize 40% of the wrong things and miss 20% of the specific things your professor actually wants.
Making your own cards is the right move when:
- Your syllabus is unique to your school or professor.
- You are learning a niche skill or a specific proprietary codebase.
- The act of making the card helps you organize the concepts in your head.
The problem, of course, is that making cards is slow. I wrote about this in my guide on the fastest way to create flashcards. If you spend four hours making cards for a one hour lecture, you are going to burn out by week six.
The time cost comparison
It is helpful to look at where your hours actually go. With a premade deck, your "cost" is all in the review phase. With custom cards, the cost is split between creation and review.
| Task | Premade Deck | Making Your Own |
|---|---|---|
| Setup Time | 5 minutes (Download) | 2-4 hours per lecture |
| Accuracy | High (if community vetted) | Perfect (matches your slides) |
| Understanding | Requires external reading | Happens during creation |
| Maintenance | None | High (fixing your own typos) |
If you are curious about whether the software itself is worth the learning curve for these custom decks, you can check out my post on is Anki worth it in 2026.
How to bridge the gap
The best strategy is often a hybrid approach. For example, if you are a med student, you use AnKing for the core science but make a small "personal" deck for the specific quirks of your school's exams. I went into more detail on this in my post about Anki for medical school.
If you are in a course where you have to make your own cards, the bottleneck is almost always the "PDF to Card" pipeline. You have a 50-slide deck and you need to get the core facts into a spaced repetition queue without spending your entire Sunday doing data entry. This is where the time-saving of a premade deck disappears into manual labor.
This is exactly why I built Nebulearn. I got tired of the friction of copy-pasting from lecture PDFs into Anki.
Solving the creation bottleneck for custom decks
When you are dealing with this week's lecture slides, you are in the "making your own" category by default. You can't download a deck for a lecture that happened yesterday.
In Nebulearn, I focused on making that "creation" step as fast as possible. You can upload your lecture PDF directly, and the AI helps you pull out the key facts into cards. You aren't "skipping" the encoding because you still have to review and approve the cards, but you are skipping the tedious typing and formatting.
We also have a Chrome extension that lets you highlight text on a page and send it to a card immediately. It stays on the page you are reading so you don't have to keep switching tabs.
If you are using Anki, stick with it for those massive 20,000 card shared decks. But if your problem is a pile of new PDFs every Monday, that is a different job.