Why the card starts face down
Retrieval is what moves something into long-term memory. Reading a question and its answer together feels productive and does almost nothing, because you never attempt the recall — the answer is right there, and recognising it is a different skill from producing it.
That is the entire reason this is a deck rather than a printable list. Every card opens on the question, you try to answer, and only then do you turn it over. The moment of effort before the reveal is the part that works, and it is exactly the part a two-column list removes.
Marking a card known takes it out of rotation, which matters more than it sounds. The default failure of revision is re-reading what you already know because it feels comfortable, while the handful of things you cannot recall stay unlearned.