How can I determine whether xyz.example.com uses a wildcard A record?
You can literally query "*.example.com" and find out if there is a wildcard, but it is impossible to tell the difference between these two zones:
xyz.example.com. IN A 1.2.3.4
*.example.com. IN A 1.2.3.4
and
*.example.com. IN A 1.2.3.4
i.e., you can't find out whether you're being answered by a wildcard for a given query, only that a wildcard exists.
I haven't found any Web-accessible looking glasses that support it yet, as they seem to think it's invalid input, but raw dig (or even nslookup on Windows) works like a charm:
c:\Some\User> nslookup
> *.my-test-domain.com
Server: Wireless_Broadband_Router.home
Address: 192.168.1.1
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: *.my-test-domain-is-not-a-real-domain.com
Address: 1.2.3.4
Or with dig:
# dig +short '*.not-a-real-domain.com'
1.2.3.4
In response to BMDan's good answer:
houdini@linode:~/ > dig '*.blogspot.com' +noall +answer
*.blogspot.com. 3352 IN CNAME blogspot.l.google.com.
blogspot.l.google.com. 52 IN A 72.14.204.191
houdini@linode:~/ > ^blogspot.com^undermyhat.org
dig '*.undermyhat.org' +noall +answer
*.undermyhat.org. 14400 IN A 83.222.226.157