"Random" new card order does absolutely nothing — same cards first every single time, no matter what I try (v3 scheduler)

[ArsenioLupin]

I’ve spent an entire afternoon trying to get new cards to actually shuffle, and nothing works. Posting the full list of things I’ve tried in case it saves someone else the trouble, and because at this point I’m fairly confident this is a bug, not user error.

Setup:

• Parent deck “German” with 4 subdecks: Other, Sentences, Noun, Verb (~11,000 cards total, imported via HyperTTS-generated audio)
• Single shared preset (“Default”) used by all decks
• v3 scheduler

Settings confirmed correct (checked repeatedly, on the parent deck AND on each individual subdeck):

• New card gather order: Random cards
• New card sort order: Order gathered
• Insertion order: tried both Sequential and Random (yes, I ignored the yellow warning telling me not to touch this on v3)

The problem: The exact same handful of cards show up first, every time, in every subdeck, regardless of what I change. Examples: “blau”, “bzw.”, “pittoresk”, “spät” in the “Other” subdeck; “Orangensaft”, “Chemie”, “Idee”, “Jacke” in “Noun”.

Everything I’ve tried, in order, with zero effect on the outcome:

1. Set “New card gather order” to Random cards (confirmed saved, confirmed applied to the correct preset used by all 6 decks)
2. Set “Insertion order” to Random as well (against the UI’s own recommendation for v3)
3. Full reset of all cards (Reset Card → “Reset repetition and lapse counts” checked) to force them back to New
4. Manual Reposition on deck:German is:new with both “Randomize order” AND “Shift position of existing cards” checked — confirmed via Card Info that Position values actually changed (e.g. one card went from Position 56 → 1656 after reposition)
5. Tools → Check Database (full rebuild of internal queues)
6. Fully closing and reopening Anki (not just restarting the study screen)
7. Studying directly from the subdeck (e.g. German::Other) instead of the parent deck, to rule out parent-deck subdeck-traversal order as the cause
8. Syncing before closing, to rule out a stale AnkiWeb copy overwriting local changes on reopen

None of the above changed which card appears first. The same cards keep appearing first across multiple hours, multiple full app restarts, and multiple explicit re-randomizations of the position field in the database.

My working theory: the “random” gather for new cards seems to use a seed that’s deterministic per day (or per some other cached value that isn’t invalidated by Check Database, position changes, or app restart), so within the same calendar day you get the exact same “random” order no matter what you do. If that’s correct, it would be nice if this were documented somewhere, because right now the deck options UI actively suggests things (like “adjust the gather order instead” of insertion order) that have no observable effect.

Has anyone found an actual fix, or can a dev confirm whether this is expected behavior tied to a daily seed? Searching the forum I found several other people reporting what looks like the same symptom (e.g. “V3 Scheduler random not working”, “Anki unable to pick up new cards at RANDOM order”), so this doesn’t seem to be an isolated case.

Anki version: [26.05] OS: [Windows]

[Anon_0000]

@ArsenioLupin

“pittoresk”

Off topic but interesting choice. FYI, if you are learning german and don’t specifically need this word, you could drop it. As a german, I don’t think I have seen or heard “pittoresk” being used, ever.

@ArsenioLupin

Searching the forum I found several other people reporting what looks like the same symptom (e.g. “V3 Scheduler random not working”, “Anki unable to pick up new cards at RANDOM order”)

I’ll just post the links here as a service for others that may want to read those:

V3 Scheduler random not working

In testing things to make a video, I found I cannot get “random” to work on the new card sort order. I can get pretty much everything else working, but I never get the cards randomized. Just wanted to bring this to your attention @dae in case it hasn’t been mentioned yet

Anki unable to pickup up new cards at RANDOM order

I have so much trouble in getting Anki present new cards at random order. I have this options <I’ll paste in next post, there;s some limit> And it seems to work initially. But If I make any shifting of cards between decks (typically combining items into one bigger deck), this starts to fail and is not random at all. The only thing that works for me is using “Random Sequential Order” - this shows a warning that it is not recommended with v3 scheduler. But this in turn requires me to turn this …

[Danika_Dakika]

@ArsenioLupin

The exact same handful of cards show up first, every time, in every subdeck, regardless of what I change. Examples: “blau”, “bzw.”, “pittoresk”, “spät” in the “Other” subdeck; “Orangensaft”, “Chemie”, “Idee”, “Jacke” in “Noun”.

Are those cards New, and never been studied before? Or are they already introduced cards in Learn? For example, if you look at the screenshot in this comment – Anki unable to pickup up new cards at RANDOM order - #20 by azaz44 – that user is going to see hundreds of Learn/Relearn cards before they see any New cards. Learn/Relearn cards are in order based on when they reached the end of their step delay, so once they are available to study, their order is set.

---

If they are actually New, see this dev comment –

V3 Scheduler random not working

The random order is designed to yield the same results from the same starting point, so that if you undo a few cards, perform an edit, etc, cards will appear in the same order they did before. If instead of undoing you did something like answer the cards or flag them to change their modification time, you should get different results.

[ArsenioLupin]

@Danika_Dakika — confirmed, and now fully understood. The bottom line: none of Reset, Reposition, Check Database, or app restarts ever mattered at all. The only thing that actually determines the order is the daily seed, which resets once at the day rollover (4am local time in my case). Within that 24h window, the “random” order for new cards is completely fixed and deterministic — no action from the user changes it, not resetting, not repositioning, not rebuilding the database, nothing.

So the actual fix for anyone hitting this: there isn’t one, within a given day. The order is fixed until the next day’s rollover. Reset/Reposition/Check Database are all no-ops as far as this ordering is concerned

@Anon_0000 — Finally I got rid of “Pittoresk”. These are my “words of the day” :

Top of “Other” today:

• hochgradigübertriebenhyperkomplexitätssteigerungsvorsatzmäßig
• streng
• inzwischen
• neugierig
• schon

Top of “Noun” today:

• Eierschalenoberteilabtrennungspräzisionsschneideapparat
• Vorschlag
• Butter
• Gürtel
• Leidenschaft

[kaiu]

@ArsenioLupin

Within that 24h window, the “random”

It should have been called “Random for 1 Day” Then we realized we needed to use filtered decks. But since we wanted to randomly select from the “Browse” window, we had to somehow rework this addon https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1188253433 to randomly select the next card to view. Sometimes randomness is useful, but rarely; it’s better to study the material in a specific order.

[Anon_0000]

@ArsenioLupin

• hochgradigübertriebenhyperkomplexitätssteigerungsvorsatzmäßig

thats not a word, though.

@ArsenioLupin

• Eierschalenoberteilabtrennungspräzisionsschneideapparat

Extremly unlikely to ever encounter this word.

[Danika_Dakika]

@ArsenioLupin

So the actual fix for anyone hitting this: there isn’t one, within a given day.

There doesn’t seem to be a strong “spaced-repetition studying” argument for having a study queue that is differently randomized throughout the day. While there are pretty strong arguments for having the queue be more fixed than that (which is why the apps have aligned to this behavior) –

• for performance reasons.
• for picking up where you left off when you leave/return to a study session.
• after an “undo a few cards to check something” action, when you want to be able to quickly step forward through the same cards to give them the same grades and get back to where you left off.

I can’t tell if your motivation was along the lines of, “I don’t want to study these 4 cards right now” or “I don’t want the cards in this random order” or something else. Depending on exactly what your goal is, other work-flows can include –

• Grade those cards, so they will stop showing up.
• Bury those cards (or flag-and-bury), and unbury to study them at the end of your session.
• Use a Filtered deck.
• Change your “starting point” [as mentioned by the dev back in 2021 – but things may have changed since then].