Every MCAT candidate I’ve talked to has the same complaint about Anki: “the AnKing deck has 30,000 cards. I can’t see the forest for the trees.”
That’s the wrong tool for the wrong job. AnKing was built to be exhaustive. What you actually need on day one is a foundation — a small set of high-yield concepts that compound across multiple MCAT sections. After you have those, comprehensive decks make sense. Before you have those, the comprehensive deck is just noise.
I went through three years of AAMC content outlines and pulled the 50 cards that show up — in some form — across the Bio/Biochem section, the Chem/Physics section, and the Psych/Soc section. Six concept clusters dominate.
The six clusters
Krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation. Six cards. The intermediates, where ATP/GTP gets made, where NADH/FADH₂ feeds in, and the inhibition points (oligomycin, rotenone, cyanide). This single pathway is testable in Bio/Biochem (metabolism), Chem/Physics (free energy and gradients), and Psych/Soc (alcohol’s effect on the NADH/NAD+ ratio). High compounding.
Hemoglobin allostery and the Bohr effect. Five cards. Cooperative binding curves, 2,3-BPG, the rightward shift, and how each compares to myoglobin. The Bohr effect is high-yield because it sits inside the Bio/Biochem foundational concepts the AAMC publishes in its MCAT content outline — it ties oxygen transport, allostery, and acid-base together in one mechanism, which is exactly the kind of cross-section integration the test rewards.
Action potentials and ion channels. Eight cards. The phases (depolarization, repolarization, hyperpolarization), Na+/K+ pump kinetics, voltage-gated channel inactivation, and the difference between absolute and relative refractory periods. Foundation for both Bio/Biochem (neurons) and Psych/Soc (neurotransmission).
Glycolysis rate-limiting steps. Four cards. Hexokinase, PFK-1, and pyruvate kinase — the three irreversible steps and their regulators (citrate, AMP, fructose-2,6-BP, insulin/glucagon). PFK-1 is a high-yield rate-limiting enzyme — energy-pathway regulation sits squarely inside the Bio/Biochem foundational concepts in the AAMC MCAT Content Outline.
Enzyme kinetics: Michaelis-Menten and Lineweaver-Burk. Six cards. K_m, V_max, the four inhibitor types (competitive, non-competitive, uncompetitive, mixed), and how each shifts the double-reciprocal plot. Bio/Biochem AND Chem/Physics testable.
Mendelian and non-Mendelian inheritance. Six cards. Punnett squares for autosomal dominant/recessive, X-linked, mitochondrial, codominance, and incomplete dominance. Plus the chi-square goodness-of-fit calculation that appears in passage form once a year.
The remaining 15 cards cover the cardiovascular system (Frank-Starling, baroreceptor reflex), the renal nephron (countercurrent multiplier, RAAS), and acid-base physiology (Henderson-Hasselbalch, anion gap).
What the cards actually look like
Every card in the deck is a cloze deletion, not a front/back Q&A. Each note can hold multiple deletions ({{c1::}}, {{c2::}}, {{c3::}}) and Avorio generates one card per cluster — which means a single biochemistry pathway becomes 3-5 independently-scheduled cards. SuperMemo’s minimum-information principle made flesh: each cluster gets its own ease, its own stability, its own next-due date.
A few examples from the deck:
Pyruvate is converted to {{c1::acetyl-CoA}} by {{c2::pyruvate dehydrogenase}},
producing {{c3::NADH}} and {{c4::CO2}}, in the {{c5::mitochondrial matrix}}.That single note generates 5 cards. Card 1 hides “acetyl-CoA” and shows everything else as context; card 4 hides “CO2” while the answer to card 1 is now visible. The FSRS-5 scheduler tracks each independently, so if you get “acetyl-CoA” cold but flub the location, only the location card moves to a shorter interval.
The Bohr effect describes how {{c1::increased CO2::or decreased pH}}
{{c2::decreases::not increases}} hemoglobin's oxygen affinity, shifting
the dissociation curve {{c3::rightward}}.The ::hint syntax (after the second ::) is shown only on the card front and disambiguates partial recalls — useful when the answer alone is too ambiguous (here, “decreased pH” works as well as “increased CO2,” and the hint flags that either is acceptable).
In glycolysis, the three irreversible steps are catalyzed by
{{c1::hexokinase}}, {{c2::phosphofructokinase-1::PFK-1}}, and
{{c3::pyruvate kinase}}.This is the SuperMemo-style overlapping pattern for enumerations: each card hides exactly one enzyme while showing the other two as context. Three cards per note, three independent schedules, three reinforcement angles on the same fact.
Why these 50 cards work the way they do
Spaced repetition isn’t magic — it’s a scheduling algorithm. Avorio uses FSRS-5, which is the current state of the art. Every card you review gets a difficulty, a stability, and a retrievability score. Cards that you find genuinely hard get scheduled more aggressively; cards you’ve internalized stretch out to 30, 60, 180-day intervals. You don’t think about scheduling. You just open the app, do the cards it shows you, and trust the algorithm.
For a foundation deck like this one, that means: in the first two weeks you’ll see most cards 4-5 times each. By week six, the easy cards (Mendelian ratios) are appearing every 14-30 days; the hard ones (Bohr effect math) are still showing up every 3-5 days. By the time you sit for the exam, the cards you struggled with most have been reviewed 20-30 times each, and the ones that came naturally have only been reviewed 6-7 times. That’s the right shape.
How to use the deck
Try the 10 most-foundational cards in your browser below. If they feel useful, tap “Install Avorio” and load the full 50-card deck onto your iPhone or Mac. Two weeks of consistent review and you’ll have a foundation that the AnKing-30k mass starts to make sense on top of.
If you find a factual error in any card, please tell us — mistakes@avorio.ai — and we’ll fix it. These are founder-built cards. Anyone with credentialed expertise we should be working with: get in touch.