Can't say that they are black hat method, but I would say that they come under gray hat SEO. However, if you are doing manually and naturally then you are safe, also you shouldn't leave any footprint if possible for better work.
To answer your question: YES, both of those methods are blackhat and I thought people knew that by now. Google doesn't like it and neither should anyone else. I can't believe that people associate manual with whitehat. Even automated processes can be whitehat in some cases. Manual link building can harm you a lot in terms of SEO as well! The thing is that as long as you're creating fake backlinks to your site with the goal of ranking better then you're doing it wrong. Whitehat links should come naturally from people liking your content, not from yourself putting up elaborate link systems to boost your websites. The Internet is a place of information, and good information will rank high because people will share it. The best thing you could do in terms of SEO is to find the people who are interested in your niche, get to know them and make them repeat visitors. That way you can almost take away all off-page SEO work from your schedule after a while. Help them share your content by putting up easy social buttons and "re-blog" button etc. TL;DR: Don't build links, build quality content and contacts. P.S: Yes I know it might be hard to get noticed without building your own backlinks at first, but at least focus on providing QUALITY to your readers along with your backlinks. Don't just put up random websites that serves no use on the Internet.
Yes creating link wheel, Link pyramids and other forcefully created links are considered as spam and if Google caught your website doing so then your website will lead to be penalized or de- rank your website keywords, so it's better to create natural one way link, while creating any link you have to check the quality of the website and what amount of value you will get from that link.
To reiterate what Wulkanen has said above - Any type of link building is blackhat. Google does not wnat you to build links, they want you to provide quality content that users are looking for and be the best in your field. Then people will link to you. As we all know however, that is slow and painful and will take years, so we build links ourselves. The trick is to do this slower than pre-penguin and make the links look natural and relavant to your niche.
Link wheels are not necessarily black hat. You can create Web 2.0 sites and link them all together so that you increase your page's relevance to its target keyword. The important things to remember are do not create closed link wheels, and use variations of your target keyword on the anchor texts. Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have further inquiries. All the best!
Creating accounts for link building purposes is black hat method of link building, if you are creating account to post useful content then it is good, you can use some links as well, but your sole purpose is creating links then it is not good, Google would catch you easily.
Google won´t punish you if you create a pyramid or link wheel. The problem why people tell you that it is not working anymore, is that most people buy or build the system with crap content. Google hates crap. You maybe know what I am talking about. I mean the spun or translated content with a massive amount of typos and the content which does not make any sense. But imagine you have some high quality blogs with very good content... you now want to link your own blogs to each other, nevermind how you do it... why should google hate it? Why should it be blackhat? I must admit, this is something I did read a few days ago on a seo related blog and it is now my opion too. It makes sense. I think google does not care too much about how the system of your links looks like. Google hates it if your content of all the blogs which point to your "moneysite" are full of crap content. And in fact most link pyramids and link wheels are based on crap content. To give you one example... make a test and rent a 5$ link wheel from fiverr... what kind of crap they will deliver you, is a bunch of links from a wheel pointing to your site but most of them are chinese, indian or russian sites and not even related to your site content.. or either horrible spun or translated articles... in worst case you will get dozen of casino and sex links pointing to your site. let´s face it... you will get crap... a package crap links pointing to your site. And then you got your cheap bad neighborhood. It isn´t much good. The neighborhood is the thing... the content.. the source which links to you... Do you all really believe that a link wheel created out of 10 high quality sites with no typos and a huge community and big authority would hurt the website you point them too? I say it is not blackhat. In fact google knows that site owners would backlink their own projects... big magazines do it everyday... what is wrong is that people focus on "creating links creating links" instead of creating high quality content. This is the problem of most so called seo´s. Create high quality content and then link the sites to each other, nevermind how you do it, will help and won´t hurt.