Now a days Link Pyramid is working great but link wheel is still active. You can still use some old school methods but the way to use those is changed. Good Luck for your linkbuilding campaign.
High, article marketing, guest posting and blog commenting can all still be good! Just make positive to diversify your link anchor texts and you should be fine.
Automated links still work, especially for churn and burn sites. Check this out: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/build-rank-spam-site-beat-google-updates/
I think, increasing awareness about quality of backlinks is the latest update in link building specially after Google's last two-three algorithm update. Now webmasters and link builders give more preference to quality of links.