Organize cards into decks and packs
Group cards in decks, nest chapters as subdecks inside a pack, and set daily limits per deck. How review works across a whole course.
A deck is a set of cards you review together. A pack is a deck that holds other decks: one pack per course, with a subdeck for each chapter. You can nest decks up to 6 levels deep.
Create a deck
- On the Flashcards page, choose the + menu, then New deck.
- Type a Name (up to 200 characters), pick a color and an icon. The colors are Coral, Blue, Green, Amber, Violet and Red.
- Choose Create deck. The card editor opens so you can write the first card.
Add a subdeck
Open the deck, choose More at the top right, then New subdeck. The new deck is created inside it. Subdecks can have subdecks of their own, down to 6 levels.
To move an existing deck, open its Deck settings (the sliders icon) and change Inside. Choose Top level to take it out of a pack. A deck cannot go inside itself or one of its own subdecks. Tiles cannot be dragged.
On the Flashcards page, a pack shows its subdecks under its tile. The chevron folds them, and Prior remembers which ones you folded on this device.
Review a pack
Reviewing a deck reviews its subdecks too. Counts on a tile include everything below it. To review one chapter, open its subdeck and choose its review button.
Set the daily limits
Open Deck settings (the sliders icon on the deck page):
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| New cards per day | How many cards you meet for the first time each day | 20 |
| Maximum reviews per day | How many cards you review in a day | 200 |
| Target retention | How sure you want to be of remembering. Higher means more reviews. | 90 % |
Under Advanced, Learning steps (minutes) (default 1 10), Relearning steps (minutes) (default 10) and Maximum interval (days) (default 36,500) tune the schedule. Restore the defaults puts the original values back. On a pack, Apply these settings to subdecks copies them to every subdeck. How these settings shape the schedule is in How Prior decides when a card comes back.
A deck's own limits cap the cards that sit in that deck itself. In a pack, each subdeck keeps its own limits, so the pack never reads "All done for today" while a chapter still has cards for today.
A deck with a study plan is different: the plan sets the pace for the deck and all its subdecks together, and New cards per day and Target retention show Set by the study plan.
Rename, recolor or delete
Everything above is in Deck settings: name, Inside, color and icon. Delete deck asks you to confirm. It deletes the deck, all its subdecks and their cards, and the confirmation lists the subdecks that go with it. The app has no way to bring a deleted deck back.
Good to know
- The deck page has two tabs: Cards lists the cards, and Stats shows counts, retention and the forecast. In a pack, Show cards of subdecks includes the chapters' cards in the list.
- To move cards between decks, use Move in the card browser.
- Anki names such as
Biology::Cellsbecome a deck inside a deck when you import them, and Claude uses the same form when it writes a course for you. See Import and export decks.
Updated 5 November 2026