Thought: Pink Wards

Pink wards are highly underrated as a form of early map control. Up until Oracle's starts appearing pink wards are an excellent way to limit enemy vision. For junglers especially a well placed pink ward can lead to important opportunities.

The hardest part of ganking for a jungler, particularly in the side lanes, is enemy vision. Wards typically block the most accessible and successful gank routes. While you can often gank around these obstacles, the psychological pressure that results from blinding your opponents can give your allies an advantage even if you never gank.

Currently the only popular place to pink ward is Dragon. It's a very safe, high value choice that your opponents will want warded. Very often a jungler or support will pink ward this location in order to establish control over Dragon and open up the river gank path. Even at higher Elos it's rare for an opposing support to have a pink ward handy, and if they do they have to worry about leaving their ally alone or being ambushed while they ward. While arguably the best place for a pink ward, Dragon is not the only place where they are potentially valuable.

Pretty much any location where the opponent must ward in order to fend off ganks or counter-jungling is a viable place for a pink ward. The hard part is tracking where wards are being placed. It's relatively easy to make educated guesses if you have decent vision of your opponents, or if you place your wards first. The key is coordinating with your jungler (or the lane if you are the jungler) to take advantage of a pink ward.

That's the ultimate answer of why pink wards aren't more common. That level of coordination is more effort that more solo queue players are willing to give, and often the players you try to coordinate with are unresponsive. Still, in ranked 5s you should practice tracking wards and countering them with pink wards, the payoff can be immense.