First, good job pushing yourself with cards! It can be frustrating and challenging especially in the beginning and sometimes people don’t want to experience that frustration so they procrastinate. I was one of those people.
Some thoughts on your improvement process:
It’s going to take time to lock in each of the associations independently to their cards. This is the toughest part and the thing that takes the most time up front. Fortunately, since you’ve based all the elements on major, you’re ahead of the game when it comes to being able to directly read your cards as each element type.
Cards inherently has an extra translation to master compared to numbers. You have to get fluent with the suit/sound conversion. You also need to get fluent at recognizing structural differences if there are any with your picture cards. I don’t recall you mentioning how you mapped each card to it’s sounds, but I assume that for the Jack Queen King you have either different sounds for them beyond the number associations or you’re inverting how you read them. It takes time for those minor adjustments to become second nature. Until it does, your focus will be compromised every time you have to pause and actively translate. Compare this to images and words and cards are even harder still because the images/words are provided for you. You just need to identify some kind of link.
This is ok though. Its part of the training process.
The other challenge you’ve identified is stamina and retention of longer runs. Your full deck attempts require you to be actively and intentionally encoding 52 elements. This is comparable to doing an images event with 52 images, or a numbers run with 104 numbers, but actually quite a bit more difficult because you have to take those extra active conversion steps with suits and picture card structures.
So its not surprising that your cards pace is much slower than other events.
You noted an important challenge with your “shooting” and “gunning” actions. If elements are too similar, it can be bad. Its ok to abandon an element that isn’t working in favor of a new one. Your brain will adapt to overwriting the association fairly quickly and it can better than trying to force a difficult one. Maybe try an alternate option, like “sh*tting” or “caning”?
Same goes for an image that is tough to recall like “gem.” Ditch it if it doesnt feel right. Is there a different word that you find yourself always saying when the 6 
object comes up during recognition practice? If so, try going with it. Maybe “jam” or “gym” or “chum” would be a better fit?
Its ok to adjust your loci as well. I had a palace that I used for cards where I always seemed to either skip or swap a certain loci (bathroom sink). I’d get to the end of the palace and have a scene’s worth of cards left and go “oh crap. what did I miss?” and it totally bricked the attempt. So I took out that location and added one on to the end. Problem solved. Be flexible if needed with those palaces and practice them for recognition and navigation just like with the card images. You’ll need to be able to basically “blink” between each loci instantly in order to get yourself under competition pace. And every hesitation when navigating robs focus and time from scene building.
Bottom line, keep at it! I’m excited to watch your improvement with this discipline!!
. Congrats on the Words pr! Keep going. It feels like yesterday that I was battling to hit 25 in a minute.
