When cycling through a large batch of cards, you can find that each pass takes a long time. Because you’re seeing each card only once every cycle – at the furthest point from the previous viewing, there aren’t enough quick successive viewings necessary to create familiarity.
If, instead of cycling through the cards, you add each one to the top of a pile, this effectively reverses the order of the cards as you work through them. On your next pass, the first few cards that you see are the ones that you have just seen.
Whilst, this doesn’t affect the cards in the middle of the pack, it does significantly increase your recall of those at the start and end of the batch.
