How to use AnKing tags efficiently for Step 1

The 35,000-card problem

The official AnKing deck (v12, comprehensive) ships with about 35,000 cards. If you study top-down, you will burn out by the second block. The whole point of tags is to chop the deck into the slice you need to drill today.

The mistake most M1s make is drilling at the wrong tag depth. Anki's hierarchical tags let you filter to #AK_Step1::Anatomy (a thousand-plus cards) or all the way down to #AK_Step1::Anatomy::Lower_Limb::Knee (a few dozen). Pick a depth that matches the resolution of your lecture, not your block.

Three rules

1. Match tag depth to lecture length. A 50-minute knee lecture maps to a third- or fourth-level tag, not the top-level Anatomy tag. SlydeMe's matcher does this automatically by vector-searching the transcript against the tag library, but if you're filtering by hand, set your AnKing filter at the same depth as the lecture title.

2. Use sibling-tag suspend instead of card-by-card delete. If your school doesn't cover a system in a given block (e.g. derm gets one lecture instead of a full week), suspend the sibling tag rather than unsuspending one card at a time. You can always flip it back on for shelf prep.

3. Drill by lecture, review by system. Day-of: drill the tag that matches today's lecture. Friday: review the system-level parent tag for everything you covered that week. The hierarchy makes that a one-click filter, not a separate deck.

The gap-fill problem

AnKing covers the average med-school curriculum, not your professor. Every lecture has 5-15 concepts the lecturer emphasized that aren't in the deck (eponyms, recent guideline changes, attending pearls). If you only drill AnKing tags, you miss them. SlydeMe's gap-fill deck is exactly those: concepts in the lecture that the matcher couldn't find a tag for. Drill it the same day, reuse the AnKing tags for review.