Unorthodox Picks Episode 2 - Shaco jungle

So Shaco is a bit of a soloQ kind of champion. He has the perfect kit to play mindgames with his opponents, with an invisbility and dash, an invisible box which fears and a slow on his autoattacks and E. When he ults, he even creates a false clone of himself, which looks identical to opponents, and they must figure out which one is the real one if they hope to survive. However, despite the mindgames, Shaco has very little brute force in his kit, and without using his mindgames correctly he can be fairly weak. He has amazing ganks and great level 2 invades, but is very vunerable to level 1 invades and is countered hard by good vision control, pink wards/upgraded sweepers and good team communication. This is why many people consider Shaco weak in the late game, but a good Shaco will mean the enemy won't HAVE a late game. Someone to watch to truly understand Shaco is the player Shaclone.

Why would I pick Shaco Jungle?

Shaco is mostly picked to completely shut down an opposing jungler or to snowball the early game extremely hard. If the enemy picks a jungler vunerable to invades such as Wukong or Amumu, Shaco is a great pick  to constantly invade them and keep them down all game. If this is in ranked it can also cause them to rage quit. Shaco can also ward their camps as well as taking them or killing the opposing jungler, making him one of the most oppressive control junglers in the game when played right. The other option is to constantly gank and/or camp lanes which have fantastic scaling. Due to Shaco's lack of hard CC this is quite hard unless the lane has a lot of gank assistance such as a Maokai lane. Lanes you would want to camp as Shaco are things such as Ryze or Casseopia who have great late games and no escapes. Due to Shaco's short blink with the invisibility, he can create some very unique ways to gank a lane that only has the typical wards down.

When Do I Avoid Shaco?

Any junglers that have great early games are fantastic against Shaco, especially those with ways of detecting Shaco while he is invisible. Due to this, picking Shaco into Lee Sin or Reksai is pretty risky, as Lee can spot you with his E and Reksai if you move during your invisibility. Not only are these junglers harder to kill in their own jungle, they also excel at dueling you in your OWN jungle, as they simply have more brute force in a duel unless you really outplay them. Even worse, one of Shaco's biggest weaknesses is being counter-ganked, and a strong duelist with good awareness will simply counter-gank and kill you and your friendly laner. Other control junglers are great at keeping Shaco down with exceptional vision control such as Nunu, so long as the other jungler's laners have good awareness.

How Do I Use Shaco Effectively?

Snowball every lane or shut down a Hyper Carry. It really can be that simple to play Shaco. A fantastic Shaco player has every buff timed, ideas where every ward the enemy has is and is constantly ganking. He doesn't farm very well, and his scaling is pretty poor so you will want to snowball hard on ganks and killing your opposing jungler down. If Late Game does come around either try to assasinate a prime target by flanking before you likely go down to the rest of the team, or simply spit-push and take down towers using your ultimate. If you really want to play mindgames, try to use your ult to bait out important cooldowns such as Flash or ultimates before fights, and set boxes in and around objectives and you may find yourself creating picks. This is more ideal for Shaco, as he doesn't teamfight very well, but creating picks is always useful to your team

Summary 

Shaco is a jungler that is heavily reliant on snowballing a game quickly to win, with rather poor scaling. However, in Solo Q, where co-ordination is kind of poor he excels at camping lanes and causing the enemy jungler to rage. His oppressive early game often means a good Shaco leads to shorter games, and that keeps his weaknesses from showing, but a team that can survive his early game will nearly always win the late game 5v5 teamfights, which is his very obvious downsides.