My Anki deck shows up as 0 every time I download a new deck

Hi I am fairly new to Anki. I have downloaded the Milesdown Coffin deck and every time I do so the deck cards show up as 0, and says I have completed the deck. I have redownloaded the app, deleted the deck and redownloaded, I have also unsuspened the cards and it still won’t work. It seems to have worked perfectly fine for my lab partners and not for me, (we all have Macbook’s). This problem also persists with other decks as well and this has always been the case for me. I have just downloaded th newest aversion of Anki and still the same problem. The only way my cards will work is if I manually add the due date to them as today and it is very stressful and a lot of work. I just want my Anki to work normally like everyone elses. Please contact me at feinariana1@gmail.com. I really do need the help and would like to fix this issue to study for the mcat!!! Thank you.

That 0 on the deck list doesn’t mean that there are no cards in the deck – it means there are no cards scheduled for todayStudying - Anki Manual. If you have a 0 for New cards as well, that means you’ve set your daily New card limit to 0.

When you create or import a deck (unless you import Deck Options with it) it starts with your “Default” Deck Options preset applied – Deck Options - Anki Manual . If you’ve changed that preset to have a New card limit of 0 – that’s why this is happening for you and not your lab partners – and why it persists for all your decks.

You can –

  • Change the daily New card limit for this preset – Deck Options - Anki Manual . (And consider how parent and subdeck limits interact – The Anki v3 scheduler - Anki FAQs ).
  • Choose a different Deck Options preset for this deck. Since it has subdecks, you should do this from the top-level deck and click “Save to All Subdecks.”
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Hi! changing the new card limit from 0 to 20 only worked for some decks. I am still having trouble because the deck I primarily wanted to use is still at 0 (Milesdown Deck by Coffin) . Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Make sure you check each preset that you have, and keep in mind that the parent deck preset will additionally limit subdecks (eg. if the parent deck has a limit of 10, and the subdeck has 100 cards, you will only get a maximum of 10 cards from the subdeck when studying the parent deck).

There is a drop down at the top of the deck options where you can swap deck presets. Keep in mind that changing a preset will apply those settings to all decks that use that preset.

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I already have it set to 20, and it still shows up as 0. (20 works for my lab partners). Could there be another issue?

That’s for the parent deck. What is going on with its subdecks?

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It is 20 for the sub decks as well

  • Do any of the subdecks have “This deck” limits that are different from the preset?
  • Have you already studied 20 New cards from this deck/these decks today?
  • Do you have any available (not suspended, not buried) New cards in this deck/these decks? [Search "deck:deck name" is:new -is:suspended -is:buried]
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no, these are my settings. it does say that these cards are used though.

As I said, you’re looking at the Options for the parent deck. Are the subdecks under this using this same preset? Do any of them have their own "This deck " limits? If you don’t want to check every single deck, from this top-level deck, you can use “Save to All Subdecks” to make sure it’s applying. Deck Options - Anki Manual

You didn’t answer these questions.

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I have not studied 20 new cards already. And how do I check that these are not suspended or not buried? These are the settings that I have for the sub decks as well. The entire deck just continues to show as 0.


Run that search I posted already – substituting in your own deck name.

I am having trouble running the search what is the exact search i should run. ?

It does say there are 0 available cards to study also.

What Danika_Dakika shared above:

Notice how she doesn’t have spaces but you do (e.g. after is:)? That’s the reason you get that error message.

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In addition to the spaces you added, you left out the -'s, which are pretty important.


It looks like your AnkiWeb account is synced, at least with your Mac Anki [I don’t think you’ll find the answer to this on AnkiMobile if you haven’t been syncing that lately] – so I checked your collection through AnkiWeb.

The reason you’re seeing 0 cards in your Decks list is that there are 0 cards in that deck and its subdecks. It’s just an empty deck tree.

"deck:MileDown's MCAT Decks - Organized by Coffin"

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So how would I get the cards there? What am i doing wrong how can I get it to work normally.?

Maybe tell us the exact steps you’re taking? Normally it would be something like this:

  1. Download deck from https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1793121559 (I assume that’s the one you’re using).
  2. In Anki, go to file → import (or whatever the mac equivalent is).
  3. Confirm the import in the window that appears.

And that’s it. Maybe create a new profile as well and try to import the deck there – if that works, it might help troubleshoot further.

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when I used the link you sent me to download it finally worked. I initially used a link off redit so I am not sure if there was something wrong with that link or not. Thank you so much

Is that just a different version of some other popular deck? It doesn’t seem to have any reviews and if I was prepping for some exam, I would go for ones with reviews. And, searching for MilesDown gives you a lot of options.