EUW carries the largest active player base in League of Legends, and the ladder is correspondingly brutal — the same rank on EUW is generally understood to be a harder rank than on most other shards. That cuts both ways for a smurf. Queues pop instantly at any hour, but the games you get are not soft, and a fresh account will not coast through its placements.
Because EUW is where most European buyers want to be, it is the shard where we hold the widest spread of stock after NA. Blue Essence Rich is the tier that moves fastest here: 90,000 essence is enough to build out several roles immediately, which matters on a shard where being a one-trick gets punished the moment your champion is banned or picked.