How to Make Anki Actually Shuffle Cards

Anki tends not to do a very good job at shuffling cards. This is an unfortunate flaw in the
program, a product of how it is designed to give you the cards that are the most due or overdue
first. The way to circumvent this is sort of roundabout but simple enough once you’ve done it.
Note however that this doesn’t necessary randomize what day the cards show up for review.
This method uses a tool called a “Filtered Deck” which can pull cards from any number of decks
you want into a temporary one that you can then force to shuffle the order. And don’t worry, as
you complete the cards in a Filtered Deck, they are automatically sent back to the home deck
they came from, so nothing gets messed up.
1. Click on the deck you want to make a filtered deck from.
2. Go to Tools -> Create Filtered Deck (or just press F). You should see the window
below (or something like it for Mac users).
3. The Search bar will
determine the criteria for the cards it
will pull into this temporary Filtered
Deck. It automatically selects the deck
you just clicked on. You can add other
decks by adding:
AND deck:”name”
Make sure you get the punctuation
symbols, spaces, and spelling of the
deck name correct, or it’ll tell you that
the search doesn’t work.
Additionally, you can add a function to
pull only the cards in certain states,
such as new cards or review cards that are due. Do this by adding:
is:due or is:new
You can also include both new and due cards if you want. Just add OR in between them like this:
is:new OR is:due
4. Then click on “cards selected by” and change it to “Random”.
5. Make sure “Reschedule cards based on my answers in this deck” is checked. It should
be by default. Anki will not remember what cards you study unless it is selected.
6. Change “Limit to” if you want more than 100 max cards and if you want “Custom
steps”.
7. Press Build.
If you get a window saying the search didn’t provide any results, you probably typed something
in wrong. Don’t forget the quotation marks, and there should be no space before/after any colons.
A “Filtered Deck 1” should appear in your deck list. (You can delete Filtered decks freely, any
cards in them will automatically be sent back to their homes.) If you have available cards from
the criteria you entered in the search bar, you should see the numbers of new and review cards in
it. Now they will be truly shuffled when you study from this deck!
Each day you want to study using this filtered deck, just click on it and press Rebuild below to
pull more cards into it. You can also press Options to adjust the criteria and settings you put in
to create the deck. Empty will send all remaining cards back to their homes.

IMPORTANT: This doesn’t easily limit which exactly which cards you want from a deck if, for
example, you haven’t learned all the cards in a deck yet, or you have subdecks that you don’t
want included. Here’s the easiest way to fix this---you basically want to suspend any cards that
you don’t currently want to study or haven’t learned yet.
1. Go to the card Browser (or press B)
2. Let’s say I have Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria divided into subdecks. If I
only want to study Gram positives, I click on its deck or subdeck in the browser, and
select all the cards it contains (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A).
3. Click Suspend on the top of the browser to suspend the selected cards. Suspended cards
are highlighted yellow in the browser and are essentially inactive until you unsuspend
them (unsuspend them by the same method). I personally suspend everything I haven’t
learned yet and unsuspend it when I’m ready to study it.
The benefit to this is that you can keep your filtered deck from pulling any unwanted or
unlearned cards without having to move them into altogether different home decks from the
cards you currently want to study.
Side Note: To create subdecks, add 2 colons between the names of the main deck and subdeck
you want (example below). You can do this any number of times to create additional subdecks:)
O&H::Bacteria::Gram Positive
Good luck studying! :)
Collin S.