As far as the quanta balance on the unupped one goes, rather than using life pends to get SoP out earlier (and then to generate loads of useless water quanta), why not stick with life pillars and add some novae or something? Particularly if you keep your life quanta usage low enough that you can run the life stuff off of ~6 pillars or something. This'd let you splash some random off-element cards and would get you SoPs earlier in a lot of cases.
Just a thought.