Elastic Search: Partial Searches

We recently had a client who wanted to search through their Mingle project for all the cards whose names ended in 3A-10. 

They read through our documentation on advanced search options, but found that searching for *3A-10 did not return any results. 

I believe the use of the hyphen and underscore symbols are what is confusing the elastic search function. Using the - symbol tells the search to exclude everything following the - unless the search terms are a perfect match. I don't think elastic search knows what to do with the underscore.

As a workaround, I told them to leave out the hyphens and underscores, use the + symbol to tell elastic search that the results must contain both 3A and 10, and use the * symbol to tell elastic search that there may be multiple wildcard characters in front of both search terms.

Here is the syntax for the search:

*3A + *10 

also *3A AND *10 is another way to write the same thing (+ and AND are interchangeable).

This search returned all the cards whose names ended in 3A-10 (example: TEST_3A-10).

If you wanted to search for all of the cards that contain 3A-10 in the name (both at the beginning and end of the name), you would just add another * symbol after the 10.

The syntax for that search is: 

*3A + *10*

Which returned not only the cards with names like TEST_3A-10, but also cards with names like 3A-10_TEST.

Does anyone know the reason why it seems like hyphens and underscores confuse the search function?