I would like an option for new cards to be sampled from a random deck, with the in-deck ordering retained.
In the current setup one must use either Deck order, losing the ability to balance across decks, or random notes, losing the ordering of cards within a deck.
I too want this feature. There are other topics/posts asking for it:
There are also similar posts:
Can you confirm what you mean by “sampled”? I’m answering this as though you’re asking about introducing New cards during a regular study session.
You can use “This deck” New card limits to keep multiple subdecks in balance. If your top-level limit is 15 (or unlimited), and each subdeck is set to 5, then the New card gather order of “Deck” will move on to the next deck when it hits each limit. [Use New card sort order “Random” to shuffle those together.]
That doesn’t work as OP said:
What I mean by sampled is that new cards should be gathered uniformly at random from subdecks, with the top card from each deck chosen whenever that deck is chosen.
Beyond the abovementioned impossibility of randomizing order across decks while maintaining within-deck ordering, I have two other major issues with any solution reliant on new card limits:
• Card Limit Adjustment Difficulty: Manually adjusting new card limits is cumbersome, especially when decks **run out of cards** (which changes the total number of new cards without your intent) or when changing the desired number of new cards (since every deck has to be changed manually)
• Review Balance Issue: Using max review limits without “new cards ignore review limits” can disrupt the cross-deck balance due to the dynamic number of review cards; later decks in the ordering may be skipped entirely when a large number of reviews is due.
The maximum review limit point is why I personally cannot use per-deck new card limits.
Say that I have 3 shared decks about French, F1, F2, and F3. These decks use different voices for example sentences, so it gets boring listening to the same voice from F1 10 times, then another voice from F2 15 times, etc.
Just using a random sort order would pull random new cards from all three decks combined, showing me cards at the end of those decks which are too difficult at my current level or depend on earlier cards.
The suggestion: Add another option to New card gather order called “Random decks”. It works like this:
The author talks about the “New Card Gather Order”.
It is also suggested to change the “New Card Sort Order” setting.
That doesn’t work either.
Then it’s not clear what you’re trying to achieve.
Read my reply above
I see a description of the new feature that you are offering. But I don’t see what you want to achieve. Perhaps what you want to get is already possible using the existing functionality.
I would personally want this feature because it allows one to study multiple subjects at once in a balanced manner (seeing each subject roughly equally) while maintaining sequential learning within each subject, which is crucial for hierarchical subjects where later cards build upon earlier ones.
Do you believe there is a feature that would allow that to happen without running into the issues outlined in my reply above?
New Card Gather Order Deck
Parent limit new 50
Child1 limit new 10
Parent::Child1
Parent::Child2
Parent::Child3
Parent::Child4
This way you can balance the number of cards from different decks. While maintaining gathered in ascending position.
New Card Sort Order Random
Randomly shuffle the previously collected cards.
I tired thinking of a way to explain it that hasn’t been already mentioned by the previous posters, and couldn’t find anything better.
The key here is that we want to randomize subdecks NOT their cards.
The current way to achieve this (manually) is to: study a new card from a deck then go back to the decks screen, choose another deck at random, study a new card from it, go back and rinse and repeat.
If you shuffle the previously gathered cards, you lose sequentiality in learning, i.e, you may see the 10th gathered card before the first, even if they were collected in the proper order you are learning them in the wrong order. If you do not shuffle, you will always see all cards from subject 1 before subject 2, etc., thus not getting an interleaving effect.
Also, as mentioned above, new card limits have the following significant issues.
• Card Limit Adjustment Difficulty: Manually adjusting new card limits is cumbersome, especially when decks **run out of cards** (which changes the total number of new cards without your intent) or when changing the desired number of new cards (since every deck has to be changed manually)
• Review Balance Issue: If one is using max review limits without “new cards ignore review limits” the cross-deck balance can be disrupted due to the dynamic number of review cards; later decks in the ordering may be skipped entirely when a large number of reviews is due.
You can change the card positions of one subdecks from 0 to N. Do the same with the other subdecks.
Then:
New Card Gather Order Ascending position
New Card Sort Order Order gathered
But this is not random, it is a sequential alternation of subdecks.
I don’t understand your comment, because I didn’t suggest a “random notes” gather. [I’d never suggest it because it’s anathema to me as someone with a lot of sibling cards. 
]
I know that you’re advocating for a different feature. But I think you also misunderstand the difference between New card gather order and New card sort order. The sort order doesn’t kick in until after the cards are gathered. It’s a good fit for your use case (and many others).
I’m not saying you can’t want the a different option – I’m just offering you ways to get what you want (or nearly what you want) now, instead of waiting for a feature update. This might require you to be flexible and use a less-than-exactly-perfect solution.
If you have the subdecks each set to the same limit, then you should use that for the “Preset” limit, and change just the parent deck to a “This deck” limit of the total (or unlimited). If all the decks are set to different limits … it seems like you’ve already volunteered for a certain amount of cumbersome limit-changing, so you probably already avoid changing them very often.
It seems like decks running out of cards won’t happen very often, but you can give your last deck a “catch all” limit, or you can insert intermediate parent/subdecks to help control the flow of cards.
[If you have so many decks that this is too difficult to manage, you should take a moment to consider that you might have too many decks.]
This may be one of those situations where you have to choose what your priority is – dynamic new card limits throttled by max review limits, or random deck sampling.
If you look at some of the many threads ZornHadNoChoice has linked to, you’ll find that “Reposition” is often suggested as a way to manage this:
[Which @Keks already said too, but I didn’t see it!]
You can use that in each deck to keep the cards in that order, but stretch them across the same series of New-queue positions (using different “step” changes in different decks, and not worrying about any overlaps), so that a New card gather of “Ascending position” will pull from the decks in an order akin to random.
It doesn’t matter if it’s gathering order or sort order (as you suggested in that reply). The current random options all ignore the order of cards within each subdeck.
Oh, you’re right. Still it shows, say, the 20 cards it gathers in a random order which is not what we want.
I didn’t understand Keks’s explanation and thought it just reordered the subdecks. Your detailed version (especially the mention of “step”) made it click.
This is a valid workaround. Thank you and to Keks.
(It would still be nice to get this feature, since messing around with “Reposition” can be dangerous if one forgets to choose the right display order.)