How do I create a custom study session of all the cards to see today that match a particular tag?

I have a deck that includes a bunch of different cards with different tags.

Some of those tags are (currently) much higher priority than the others, and I want to make sure to study the cards with those tags first (separately from the rest of the deck), and to otherwise not deviate from the review schedule.

How do I create a custom study session / filtered deck that includes cards 1) with the relevant tag and 2) that would come up in my review today? (They would come up in my review today because they’re either new cards, or learning cards, relearning cards, cards that are due for review, or cards that are overdue for review.)

If click “custom study” on that deck, and click “study by card state or tag”, I have a number of options, but all of them leave out some cards that should be included.

  • The “Due cards only” in particular gives me a popup “no cards matched the criteria that you provided” (which doesn’t make any sense, since there are definitely due cards with that tag). Relatedly, when I try to make a filtered deck with “is:due” and the tag, it says that no cards are matching that criteria.

  • “All review cards in random order” gives me a custom study session entirely of cards that are not due yet? (Also they only have two buttons, instead of the usual 4? Why is that?)

  • There doesn’t appear to be an option which is “Due cards and new cards and learning cards”.

Can someone help me out? Am I misunderstanding something here?

I have an inkling that the problem might be that “Learning” cards count as neither due nor nor new, and all of the cards that are showing up as “due” on my home page are actually not technically “due” but “learning”. Does that make any sense?

If so, how do I start a custom study session, or filtered deck, of “learning” cards?

Any help would be appreciated.

is:due AND tag:TAGNAME AND is:new

(This wont work, check the solution below)

Check out the docs for more details:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/searching.html?highlight=new%20card#card-state

That query doesn’t match any cards. Which makes sense, given my current apparently flawed understanding, because there shouldn’t be any cards that are both due and new, they’re mutually exclusive.

Also, when I filter for just is:due AND tag:TAGNAME that also returns 0 results. I’m not sure why.

Some cards can’t be pulled into a filtered deck. With the old scheduler (see below) that includes learning cards.

That’s the behvaviour of the old scheduler. Maybe give the v3 scheduler a try.

That’s correct.

In the browser? Then there apparently are no more due cards with that tag today.

Now as for your actual problem, you can create a filtered deck with two filters and use one to select due cards and the other one to select new cards. However, this requires the v3 scheduler and isn’t as flexible as a regular deck.

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Ok my summary of what I understand:

  • With the old scheduler you can’t pull learning cards into filtered decks, for some reason. If I want to make a filtered deck (or a custom study session) that includes “learning” cards, I need to upgrade to version 3 of the scheduler.
  • The reason why when I try to do a custom study session with “Due cards only” returns an error “no cards matched the criteria that you provided”, is that all of the cards that I have that are “due” of that tag, are also learning cards. (I’m surprised that a card can both be a learning card and be due, but maybe this is because I’ve set this deck so that my interval for “again” is 24 hours.)

It seems like my main problem is that I’m using the old scheduler, and that is giving me pretty confusing results.

Testing that I did to verify my understanding: I put each of these searches in the browser, and also put it into the search bar for building a filtered deck, to compare results.

tag:calculus is:due

  • Browser: 3 cards
  • Filtered deck: Only one card

tag:calculus is:learn

  • Browser: 2 cards, both of which are also in due.
  • Filtered deck: [error message: “The provided search did not match any cards. Would you like to revise it?”]

tag:calculus is:new

  • Browser: 3 cards, one of which is suspended.
  • Filtered deck: 2 cards

Ok! Updating my version of anki and using the new scheduler fixed everything!

Now I can do what I asked for originally by creating a filtered deck with tag:calculus (is:new OR is:learn OR is:due)

Thank you for your help!

2 Likes

Nicely done! Also apologies, i answered the question wrongly. Glad you figured it out ‌‌( ´ ー ` )b