Probably before Faction Wars, there was little incentive for people to play World. Just for the record, World does admit some fascinating HQ strategies.

1. UHQ

UHQ/World has to be the Chron X boogie monster, everybody's ultimate nightmare. Against "normal" decks, you'll have a lot of fun. But it doesn't work, because of:

2. Armored/Symmetric Channel

Find enemy HQ as soon as you draw that first Shiden Tech. Dump your hand there. If it's a UHQ with no defense, say "gg".

Channel is UHQ's "nemesis". If you rely on UHQ to "buy yourself some time", you'll kill a lot of decks that rely on searching to find you quickly, and you'll lose to early Symmetric Channels. In the long run, which of those two factors is more significant in the majority of the games you'll play? Hint: it's not the red card.

3. DHQ/speed

Remember that World has minimum distance of 3, like America. With a good DHQ spread, you can eliminate all but 3-4 cities. That's faster than Europe, almost as fast as Asia. Rest of your deck can be standard Thalmann speed. Conversely, any other kind of World deck absolutely must include anti-speed defense, or DHQ/speed will eat you up on turn 5.

If your opponent takes a long time on Turn 1, say 20-40 seconds, then he's probably evaluating his DHQ spread to see which cities he left uncovered. So you can expect visitors to arrive shortly. If you're looking at Thalmann, AP Mine, 2 Viral Vines, and 2 Dresdner Security Bot, you can start doing the happy dance.

What's the point of playing DHQ/speed when your opponent just has to PDA for Rain? And yet, even though Rain vastly outnumbers Channel in competitive play, that hasn't stopped DHQ/speed from running rampant.

4. Rain

DHQ/speed beating you down before you can get your Womb / SLAM / Failsafe / Cult / Transcendent deck going? Try ye basic anti-speed defense + Acid Rain. Kills DHQ/speed dead. Kind of sucks against AHQ. Obviously, you could use AHQ yourself.

Also, even the Armored/Symmetric deck doesn't plan to find you on Turn 2. That's just a great draw, like Turn 1 Thalmann Anceph 2 Doremann. Congratulations, you are now a statistic.