Curated classes vs. building your own deck

Every new study app has the same cold-start problem: on day one, you have an empty deck and a blank page, and building 300 good cards from scratch is its own project before you've reviewed a single one. Curated classes exist to remove that problem for common subjects - full decks written and checked in advance, so you can start reviewing on day one instead of spending week one just writing cards.

What a curated class actually is

A finished, organised deck - class, units, chapters - covering a subject end to end, built with real source material behind it rather than assembled ad hoc. You enroll and start reviewing immediately. You can't edit the master copy directly, which is deliberate: it keeps the shared version consistent for everyone using it, the same way a textbook doesn't get rewritten by every reader.

What building your own gets you that curated can't

Your own notes, your own professor's specific framing, your own class's weird edge cases that a general deck was never written to cover. No curated deck can anticipate the exact three slides your instructor emphasised that nobody else's syllabus mentions. For anything specific to your course, your own deck - built from your own notes - is going to fit better than the closest general equivalent.

The actual answer: use both, for different things

Curated classes are the fastest way to get broad, foundational coverage of a subject without a week of setup - the fundamentals, the stuff that's genuinely the same across course sections and universities. Your own deck is where the specifics of your particular class, your particular professor, and the material that's actually going to be on your particular exam belong. Neither one replaces the other; they cover different failure modes. Skipping the curated option means re-deriving material that's already been written and checked. Skipping your own means missing whatever's unique to the class you're actually taking.