We study the metric distortion of the minimum spanning tree (MST) problem when numerical edge weights are unavailable and each vertex reports only a ranking of the other vertices induced by these weights. We first show, through a simple example, that without assumptions on the weights, no ordinal algorithm guarantees a finite approximation ratio. We therefore focus on general metrics and present a Borůvka-inspired algorithm using only ordinal comparisons that achieves distortion $O(\log n)$. We complement this result by showing that, for every $\varepsilon>0$, no deterministic ordinal algorithm guarantees distortion at most $3/2-\varepsilon$ on all finite metric instances. We then investigate more informative settings in pursuit of constant distortion, first considering two well-studied metric classes. For tree metrics realized on the given vertex set, a more careful variant of our initial algorithm achieves distortion~$1$, recovering an optimal MST from ordinal information alone. For the broad class of doubling metrics, a different algorithm based on \emph{endpoint cut stability} achieves distortion $2^{O(D)}$, where $D$ is the doubling dimension; this is constant for fixed $D$, independently of $n$. Finally, we study a query-based extension allowing comparisons between two edge lengths without revealing their numerical values. For general metrics with $n\geq2$, fewer than $n$ edge-comparison queries suffice to achieve distortion at most $2\log_2^* n-1$, which is near-constant even for very large inputs.
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