Easily Reset an Anki Deck in 5 Quick Steps

Co-authored by Nicole Levine, MFA Reviewed by Luigi Oppido

Last Updated: August 10, 2023 Fact Checked

Do you want to reset your Anki cards to make your old review cards new again? Creating virtual flashcards in Anki is an awesome way to study for exams, as Anki's algorithm can help you balance learning new material and reviewing cards you already know. While Anki doesn't recommend resetting your cards when you're behind in review, you can reset or reschedule all or part of an Anki deck to "forget" the cards that you want to see more often. This wikiHow article will teach you how to reset one or more Anki cards in a deck using the Anki desktop app or your web browser.

Things You Should Know

To reset or reschedule Anki cards, you'll need to use the Anki desktop app or Anki Web—there is no reset feature in the Anki apps for Android, iPhone, or iPad.
You might feel the need to reset your entire Anki deck, but it's usually a better study practice to just reset the cards you need to review.
If you're falling behind often, consider changing your daily review limit to introduce more or fewer new cards per day.

Section 1 of 3:

Should you reset your Anki deck?

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This is useful when you've made changes to cards or otherwise want to make unfamiliar cards new again. Just make sure not to reset the cards you haven't made changes to or have already learned.
Even if you have a large backlog of cards to review, resetting your deck is not recommended and can even interfere with your ability to learn newer and more difficult material. After all, you'll have to start over with the cards you've already learned, which means you'll see those cards just as often as the ones you still need to learn.^{[1]
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Section 2 of 3:

Resetting Your Cards

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If you're using Anki on a computer or in your web browser, you can easily reset your progress in a deck by "forgetting" the cards.
You'll see this at the top of the window.
If you have multiple decks, you can choose a deck (such as a Zanki deck) from your deck list in the left panel.
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Select all of the cards you want to forget. You can click and drag to highlight all the cards, or hold down the Ctrl key (PC) or Command key (Mac) to select multiple cards at once.
- You can quickly select all cards by pressing Ctrl + A (PC) or Command + A (Mac).
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Click Cards menu and select Forget. This instantly changes the state of the selected cards back to New.^{[2]
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- You can also just right-click the selected cards and choose Forget, or press Ctrl + Alt + N.
- While your history will still show any previous reviews you've completed, that won't influence the forgotten cards, which are now new again.

Section 3 of 3:

Alternatives to Resetting

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If you have too many cards in your review deck and want to bring the difficult ones to the front of the queue, mark the cards you already know as Easy to convert the card to a Review card.^{[3]
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Research source} The card will then be shown 4 days later, and then at an increasing interval as you continue to study with the deck. In the meantime, you can catch up on the cards you still need to review.
If you're getting too much new information before learning older cards, you can go to Tools > Preferences (Windows/Linux) or Anki > Preferences (Mac) and set the second drop-down box to after all reviews.
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Change your daily review limit. If it's been hard to recover from a backlog of cards, you can set up a daily review limit to study a set of overdue cards until you've caught up.^{[4]
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Research source} The default is 200 per day, but you can click the Reviews tab and select a lower value for "Maximum reviews/day.
- You can also try the Anki Limit New extension, which limits the number of new cards shown based on your current workload. You can get it from https://github.com/ig3/anki-limitnew.^{[5]
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