A new source of metastable argon atoms in the thermal energy range is reported. The source is based on expanding a plasma sustained by electromagnetic surface waves in a quartz tube through a converging nozzle and extracting a beam from the supersonic free-expansion jet. The beam was characterized by time-of-flight measurements which yielded the absolute intensity and velocity distribution of the argon metastables. The source produced a maximum intensity of 6.2X10(14) metastables per second per steradian, the highest time-averaged intensity of thermal argon metastables of any source reported to date. A simple picture of an expanding plasma in a recombination regime is used to explain the dependence of the metastable intensity on absorbed power.