excluding posts by an ACF field in pagination

So I have this

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$args = array(
    'post_type' = 'post',
    'posts_per_page' = 12,
    'category' = 1165,
    'meta_query' = array(
        'meta_key' = 'price_special',
        'value' = array('New Boat', 'Under Offer', 'Reduced', 'Just Added', 'Coming soon', 'New Build'),
        'compare' = 'IN',
        ),
    'suppress_filters' = false,
    'meta_key' = 'price',
    'orderby' = 'meta_value_num',
    'order' = 'DESC',
    'paged' = $paged,
);
$query = new WP_Query($args);

but the meta_query is having no effect on the number of results and therefore the number of pages, can anyone tell me where I am going wrong please?