If you try to check your competition, especially those on top of the page 1 after the penguin update you will see that a lot of these sites have spammy backlinks. Lots of them. In one of my niches I found out that the backlinks of the top 1 site has backlinks from blogrolls,blog networks and blog comment blast (totally unrelated spam sites). So if you are going to ask me if black hat strategies will be gone, heck NO!
I am still doing link pyramids for my sites and for my clients' and so far I have no problems with this strategy. I just try to avoid BLASTS. And almost all 1st tier links are manually done.
I would strongly suggest to spend more time (or your outsource worker) on manually building backlinks through blog commenting to high pr "pages" of blogs. It would also help a lot if it is related to your industry. And when I say that I mean the niche itself and not the page. I've been doing this and fortunately my sites are gaining their positions back. btw, I've hit by this recent updates too.
