I did that as well. That deck is basically (with a few differences) an Anki version of Helsig's "Remembering the Kanji". I started with the book, and continued with the Nihongo Shark Anki deck later. The system works incredibly well for the first few hundred Kanji at least, after that it gets harder and harder to come up with the mnemonic devices the method is based on. But by that time it also starts to get easier to remember new kanji by traditional methods (in my experience at least). Even with my still incomplete number of kanji it does help tremendously with reading. It's faster and takes much less effort than trying to read just Hiragana (which I learned to read many years ago - it's still hard to read text written only in Hiragana). And with just kana you'll run into the homonym problem all the time too, unlike with kanji, and that doesn't make it easier either. Oh, and knowing the kanji can also sort out the (probable) meaning of a sentence even if I have not learned the actual word yet..