Hi, I had a question about how new cards are organized in the AnKing Step deck when using the default display settings.
My current settings are:
New card gather order: Deck
New card sort order: Card type, then order gathered
New/review order: Mix with reviews
Interday learning/review order: Mix with reviews
Review sort order: Due date, then random
With these settings, are new cards shown based on the cardâs position/order in the deck, oldest-created first, or some mix of both?
Also, does the AnKing team strategically position cards within the deck, such as having higher-yield cards appear first, or is the order mostly based on how the cards were added and organized by tags?
Iâm mainly asking for my own understanding because Iâm not in classes right now and I donât really like using filtered decks at this point. Iâm reviewing my first-year content over the summer and unsuspending cards based on videos as I go, so I wanted to better understand whether the default card order has any meaningful structure.
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Hereâs how this works with your current settings and the AnKing Step Deck specifically.
1. How Anki chooses which new card to show you
Your relevant settings:
New card gather order: Deck
New card sort order: Card type, then order gathered
New/review order: Mix with reviews
Step 1 â âGather order: Deckâ
âDeckâ means:
Anki looks at the current deck youâre studying.
It then gathers new cards from that deck and its subdecks, in the order the decks appear in the browserâs deck list.
Within each deck, it gathers new cards in their card ID order (which is usually the order in which the notes/cards were created / added).
So: gather order is based on how/when cards were added, not on their position in the browser or on tags.
Step 2 â âSort order: Card type, then order gatheredâ
After gathering:
Cards are first grouped by card type (e.g., cloze vs basic).
Within each card type, they follow the order gathered from Step 1.
So practically: with your settings, new cards show roughly in the order they were created in the deck, grouped by card type. It is not âoldest created first across the whole deckâ in a global sense, but thatâs a good mental approximation for the cards youâre seeing.
âMix with reviewsâ just shuffles new cards into your reviews; it doesnât change which new card is next, only when it appears between reviews.
2. Is the AnKing Step Deck âstrategically orderedâ?
Based on the AnKing Step Deck documentation and FAQs:
The primary organization is by tags, which correspond to:
Exam relevance (e.g., dedicated/highâyield tags, Step 1 vs Step 2)
The actual card order in the deck is not meant to be a carefully curated âhighestâyield firstâ linear sequence.
The AnKing team expects users to:
Unsuspend by tags or filtered decks (e.g., following a video resource or course),
Rather than rely on âdefault orderâ of new cards.
So there is no intentional âtopâtoâbottomâ strategic order of individual cards like âall the highestâyield cards were added first.â Itâs more a product of:
When source decks were merged,
How notes were imported and edited over time,
Ongoing updates via AnkiHub.
3. What this means for you (summer review, unsuspending via videos)
Given that:
Youâre not in classes now,
Youâre unsuspending cards based on videos as you go,
You donât want to use filtered decks right now,
then:
Youâre already doing the âintendedâ thing: using tags (resource-based unsuspension) to control what you see.
Within those unsuspended cards, the exact default order of new cards doesnât have a strong pedagogical structure beyond:
Grouping by card type,
Roughly âolderâcreated firstâ for that set of cards.
So for practical purposes:
The default newâcard order in the AnKing Step Deck does not encode a special educational sequence. The meaningful structure is in the tags and what you choose to unsuspend, not the precise newâcard order.
If youâd like, I can suggest:
A simple way to tweak your newâcard settings for summer review without filtered decks (e.g., by priority tag or system), or
How to check, for a given subdeck or tag, what ânew orderâ youâre actually getting.
From the deck settings screen within Anki, you can click here to get more specific information as to how the Anki software options determine your card appearance order:
Additionally, the Anki manual is generally the go-to resource for anything technical related to the software.
From what you shared, it appears that you new card gather order is set to âdeck.â
A cardâs yield does not determine its position in Anki, as this runs fairly counter to the underlying design of interleaving and the Anki software as a whole. That being said, there are tags for yield and you can choose to focus on cards based on relative yield determinations.
This article can walk you through how to use high-yield tags and similar: Google Search
Please let me know if that answers your question, and if thereâs anything else I can help with.
