Two near-identical custom field types - one works, the other doesn't . What can cause this?

I found an older post showing what I was missing from my code, so it seems like I didn’t do a good enough search to begin with.

For anyone wondering I was missing 'compare' => 'LIKE' from the query, so the code would look like this:

$args_post = array('post_type' => 'release', 'orderby' => '_custom', 'order' => 'ASC', 'posts_per_page' => -1, 'meta_query' => array(
    array(
        'key' => 'classification',
        'value' => 'Data',
        'compare' => 'LIKE',
    ),
  ), 
);

Everything’s working like a charm now!

UPDATE

While this solution works, please note @PieterGoosen’s comments to the question:

LIKE comparisons are quite expensive to run. Also, serialized data is really not meant for searching and ordering operations. The issue here is with LIKE as well is, if you search for dot, mydot, dot, dotcom are also returned

What the LIKE comparator do is, it does not search for exact mathes like a comparator like maybe IN would do. It searches, for anything that is likely to match the term. If you where to search for a custom field value of say dot, or lets say as in your example Data, the like comparator would search and return anything with those 4 letters in sequence of data, so it would return Data, data-mining, database and crappy-data if you have those 4 words in database. So this make the LIKE very unreliable, which is why you should avoid serialized data

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