Ok, to beat a dead horse..
I just tested with AutoCAD 2012 (which I still have on my machine) and apparently this method needs to be used for 2012 too.
It behaved the same way it did in 2013, where a wild-card simply put "SEE PLAN" between the EL. and the elevation number(s) [see screen shot].
Testing the same drawing adding the ["] to the[*] = find [EL. *"] it replaced them as I expected.
So I don't know when this changed, apparently I haven't done it in a while where I used a wild-card.
~Shrug~
This is good to know though...