What AnKing V12 Actually Is
AnKing V12 is a community-maintained Anki deck built primarily for USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK preparation. It is not an official product from any medical licensing body. It is a massive collection of flashcards that overlays First Aid, Pathoma, SketchyMicro, SketchyPharm, and UWorld explanations onto individual cards. The deck is freely shared through Ankidroid and desktop Anki. The current version sits at V12, which means the card pool, tag structure, and image links have been revised several times since the original releases. There is nothing particularly secret about how the deck works. You install it, you set your daily review limits, and you go through cards using spaced repetition. What most people miss is the tag system. The deck uses a flat tag structure that maps directly to resource sections, organ systems, and question type. When you filter by tags like pathoma_chapter or sketchy_micro_bacteria, you get a targeted subset of cards. That filtering is where the deck becomes useful rather than overwhelming. I downloaded the V12 pack after a friend sent the AnkiWeb link during my first year of med school. The file was roughly 4.2 GB. Importing it took about 45 minutes on a machine with 16 GB of RAM. Anki complained about the media size and asked if I wanted to verify the media. I clicked yes and waited another 20 minutes while it checked every image and audio file. The import succeeded but my initial reviews were completely chaotic because I did not set up any custom decks or filters.
The deck is divided into categories that correspond to the resources it pulls from. The microbiology section contains cards created from SketchyMicro videos. Each organism has multiple cards covering morphology, virulence factors, disease associations, and treatment. The pharmacology section works the same way with SketchyPharm content. The pathology cards are largely derived from Pathoma chapters. The biochemistry section is smaller and relies more on First Aid content than on external videos. One thing nobody tells you about AnKing is that the deck includes UWorld explanations as cards. This means the deck does not just test your recall. It also reinforces the reasoning behind each UWorld question. That is valuable but it creates a problem. The UWorld cards are dense. Each card can contain a full paragraph of explanation text. When you review 1,500 cards a day, many of those paragraphs become background noise. Your brain stops processing the detail because the volume is too high. The workaround I used was to adjust my new card limit. I set my daily new cards to 60 and kept my reviews around 800. This meant I processed the UWorld cards slowly enough to actually read the explanation instead of clicking through them. It took longer to finish the deck but retention was significantly better. The deck is designed for a full dedicated study period where people review 1,000 to 2,000 cards per day. That is not realistic for everyone.
Another nuance that beginners miss is the ease of learning button. AnKing uses custom timing settings on most cards. The default ease adjustment pushes cards forward when you answer correctly and brings them back when you answer incorrectly. The problem is that some cards are tagged with the beginner option active. This means the deck treats them differently during reviews. If you do not notice which cards have this tag, you will get confused when certain cards come up way too often or way too rarely. The download itself is straightforward. You go to the AnKing deck page on AnkiWeb and click the download button. The file is hosted on their primary repository. You open Anki on desktop, go to File, choose Import, and select the downloaded .apkg file. Then you go to Manage Decks and find the AnKing deck. It will appear under the default deck list. From there you can customize your study settings or leave everything on auto-pilot. Here is a blunt truth about the deck that most review articles will not tell you. The card quality is inconsistent. Some cards are very well written with clear stems and good distractors. Other cards are poorly formatted, have typos, or contain outdated information. This happens because the deck is maintained by volunteers who contribute edits sporadically. Version 12 cleaned up a lot of the older errors but it did not eliminate them entirely.
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I encountered a specific edge-case problem during my own reviews. A card about the mechanism of action for a particular antibiotic had the drug name misspelled in the front field. The answer was still correct but the typo made the card useless for recall training. I flagged the card through the built-in flagging system and created my own corrected version as a note. This is something you have to do regularly with AnKing. Do not assume every card is accurate just because it is in a popular deck. The deck also includes image occlusion cards. These are blanked-out diagrams where you have to recall what was hidden. They are useful for anatomy and histology but they require the Image Occlusion Enhanced addon in Anki desktop. Without that addon, the cards will not display properly. I found this out the hard way after importing the deck and watching half my card reviews show up as broken images. Installing the addon took about five minutes and fixed the problem immediately. There is a limitation worth mentioning. AnKing V12 does not cover every topic on the USMLE Step 1 or Step 2 CK exam. Areas like ethics, biostatistics, and some procedural skills are underrepresented. If your main weakness is in those subjects, this deck will not help you enough. You need supplemental resources for those gaps. The deck excels at basic sciences and clinical correlations but it is not a complete curriculum replacement.
Some people complain that the deck is too large and takes months to finish. That is true if you use it as your only study material. A realistic timeline for going through the entire deck is about three to five months depending on your daily review commitment. During a dedicated study period, most students spend six to eight weeks on the deck after they have already completed their primary resources like UWorld and First Aid. The deck is meant to reinforce, not replace. One more practical point. The deck includes audio files for SketchyMicro and SketchyPharm. These are embedded in the cards. If you are studying on a phone, the audio will play automatically when you flip the card. If you are using AnkiDroid, make sure you are on version 2.18 or later for smooth playback. Older versions of the app have buffering issues with large audio files and can cause review sessions to lag significantly. If you decide to use this deck, the best approach is to start with a small subset. Pick one category like cardiovascular pharmacology and review those cards for two weeks before expanding to other systems. This lets you calibrate your settings and understand how the deck behaves before you commit to the full schedule. Jumping straight into 1,500 cards a day usually leads to burnout within the first month.
The V12 version also includes updated links to the current editions of First Aid and UWorld question explanations. Some older cards in previous versions pointed to outdated PDF pages. If you notice references to chapter numbers that do not match your current edition of First Aid, those cards likely predate the V12 update. You can search for cards with those outdated references and create replacements using the tagging system. I should also mention that AnKing decks are not meant for board certification exams or specialty board reviews. The content is specifically aligned with the USMLE style and the topics covered on those exams. If you are preparing for COMLEX or for a different licensing exam, the card selection may not match your curriculum closely enough to rely on this deck alone. Below is the direct download link. The file size is substantial and the import process requires a decent amount of free disk space. Make sure you have at least 6 GB available before you start the import. Anki will store the deck files plus a copy of the media in your collection folder.
AnKing Deck V12 Download The deck has been tested on both Windows and macOS Anki desktop clients. It works on Linux as well but some users report minor font rendering issues with certain Chinese characters in the microbiology cards. If you run into display problems, switching to a different font in the Anki card styling settings usually resolves it. The default card template uses a system font that sometimes does not support all character sets included in the deck. I mentioned earlier that the deck includes tags for nearly every resource section. The tag names are standardized so you can search by typing them into the search bar. Common tags include sketchy_micro, pathoma_ch1, fa_cardio, and uworld_qbank. Using the search syntax like tag:sketchy_micro is faster than browsing through subdecks. The deck also supports advanced filtering by difficulty and last reviewed date if you need to target specific review patterns.
One final observation. The effectiveness of this deck depends heavily on your review consistency. Spaced repetition only works if you actually do the reviews every day. Skipping several days causes the review queue to pile up and you will face thousands of cards at once. I have seen students lose progress after taking two weeks off because their delayed reviews overwhelmed their daily limits and they gave up entirely. Set a realistic daily target and stick to it, even if you cut it in half on busy days.
