Did you use the Empty Cards tool?
Thank you so much Brian, I have one more question - When I am doing review cards (I had moved cards around and separated them by topic e.g. Neuro 1 ), it seems like the order is not compeltely randomized. I feel like I am getting the same cards from the same topics for e.g. my MAD 2 deck only asks me about spirochetes and chla/gonnor, I have not had a single card from enteric organisms or any of the other organisms in 3 weeks. Do you know why this may be
For example, right now im doing the MAD 2 deck and all my last 25 cards were fungals.
Could be a few things. The first thing to point out is that, while the order on any given day should be random, that doesnât mean that the distribution of your cards overall is random (it almost assuredly isnât, and this is normal).
I.e. if you have 600 cardiovascular cards introduced, and only 200 psych cards introduced, obviously all things being equal the distribution is going to dictate that you see more cardiovascular cards just because there are more of them.
Then, if the cardio cards are also newer, and/or more difficult, they are naturally going to show up more often. This, again, is still ârandomâ in terms of order selection but it sort of canât be entirely random by review history and desired retention, if that makes sense. I for sure have certain topics that show up a lot more often, and this is both normal and good, because there are more of them, or they are newer, or they are harder, or a combination of all three.
But, all that being said, you can double-check your deck settings to make sure that the cards you are seeing on any given day are indeed selected randomly.
From deck settings, look at âDisplay Orderâ and check your âReview sort orderâ here:
If you want your reviews to be truly random, you would select random from the drop-down options list:
From there, you would also want to make sure that this setting is the same for all of your presets and/or decks. If one deck is set to random, but your other 15 decks (and/or presets) are not, thatâs going to introduce some non-randomness for sure.
I will say that, at least personally, I donât use the ârandomâ feature. Might take a bit too long to type out all the rationale, but the current recommendation is to use âDescending retrievabilityâ, for a few reasons.
Let me know if thatâs helpful, what you find, and weâll go from there. 
I have been using new then random, I donât seem to have descending retrivability as an option
If youâre using new then random, and youâre certain that all of your decks and presets have that setting, then your cards are being selected randomly. But, again, Anki is only really selecting randomly from the cards that happen to be due that day.
-
Whichever cards are due? Anki is choosing from those randomly.
-
However, the distribution of cards that are due on that day, so the pool from which Anki is choosing, is definitely not entirely random (and canât be, really).
TL; DR: cards that are due are not random (and cannot be, for lots of reasons). But, from the cards that are due, Anki will choose from amongst them randomly.
Let me know if that answers your question, and if thereâs anything else I can help with.
If I want to use descending retrivability, how do I download that feature
I believe youâll have to be on the latest Anki release (25.02). If I recall correctly, it was released in 25.01 or 25.02, somewhere in there
You can grab the latest release here: https://apps.ankiweb.net/