Running the latest version of Anki desktop MacOS:
Version 25.09.2 (3890e12c)
Python 3.13.5 Qt 6.9.1 Chromium 122
I have a deck with ~3000 cards and if I add zero new cards then my typical day involves 30-40 reviews after a while of not adding anything. Recently I’ve been trying to add more cards, so I’ve been adding 10/day consistently over the last week or two and (expectedly) my daily review count has been going up and it’s currently sitting around 60/day excluding new card reviews.
I wanted to see what this would look like long-term, so I opened the FSRS Simulator and ran it with my current settings of 10 new cards/day and a review limit of 60/day with 90% retention and this is how my graph turned out:
I thought it was kind of strange that it starts out around where I’m currently at in terms of reviews, but it drops off sharply and returns to the 30-40 reviews/day that I was seeing without any new added cards.
If I change the “new cards/day” to 100 the generated graph is exactly the same. So it seems that this tool does not actually use the “new cards/day” input field at all when doing the simulation. IMO it should either be removed, or the simulator modified to actually take it into account cause it’s incredibly misleading to have an input field that does nothing to change the results of the simulation.
Interestingly, using 0, 1, and 2 all result in slightly different graphs. However 3 and above all result in exactly the same graph. If anything, more new cards per day should make the simulation graphs diverge even more, not converge to a single result. All the inputs result in basically an identical overall graph:
“new cards/day” inputs used: 0, 1, 2, 3, 10, 100
By default, the simulator only includes the cards that are currently in your deck. I suspect you don’t have enough new cards remaining in your deck for the “new cards/day” setting to make a difference. If you want to simulate adding more cards beyond the ones that already exist, use the “Additional new cards to simulate” option.
For example, if you set “Additional new cards to simulate” to 36500 or higher, you’ll be able to do up to 100 new cards/day for a full year without running out of cards.
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Okay, so the “new cards/day” only works if you actually have new cards available. That’s a little confusing if you don’t know, and there’s nothing in the simulator that tells you this is how it works so it would be nice to at least have either better names for those input fields or to include tooltip text (or a warning maybe?) that tells you it might not work how you expect.
When I set my new cards to simulate to 3650 and my new cards/day to 10 I do get a graph that looks more realistic:
